Evolutionary explanations for religion: An interdisciplinary critical review

Abstract

Some form of religion exists in every documented society on earth. However, ‘religion’ is a multifaceted phenomenon commonly including aspects, such as rituals, myths, rules and regulations concerning ethical behaviour, social practices and some form of belief in the supernatural (e.g. gods, spirits or souls). Due to its pervasiveness, many researchers of biological and cultural evolution have suggested that religion needs a universal evolutionary explanation. However, most proposed explanations have either treated religion as a single all-encompassing entity or only focused on a single or a few aspects of religion. We propose, instead, to carry out an extensive review of such suggested evolutionary explanations with the express aim of pairing up proposed explanations with religious components in order to form a more comprehensive depiction of causation and how religion and human cognition both have evolved, each influenced by the other. We also propose to summarise predictions and hypotheses that spring from each explanation, with the express aim of stating how each may be evaluated and tested. Crucially, different aspects of religion may have different explanations and different explanations may apply to several aspects of religion. Proposed explanations will be summarised in a series of thematically oriented scientific articles, as well as in a summary monograph. Our dual competencies, in evolutionary theory and religious studies, provide us with a unique opportunity to evaluate these issues from both a natural and a humanistic point of view.