God evolved from the apes

[Zandrav Ibistenn]

Evolutionary biologists have suggested that the mechanisms behind religion have surfaced in intelligent herd animals to discourage free riders by strengthening the sense of group. Normally the members of the group will stick together because they do things together. They cooperate, help each other and receive help themselves. A free rider is an individual who is only willing to receive from the group, not to give to it. Obviously, too many free riders dampen the efficiency of the group and decreases survivability, and therefore evolution favours traits and behaviors that benefit the group as a whole by limiting free riders.
In smaller pack simple grooming is sufficient to hold the individuals together (as apparent in many monkeys/apes) and discourage free riding. In larger packs however, grooming becomes increasingly impractical, both because of the number of members and perhaps the distance between them.
Enter religion. The members of the group have something similar to believe in, agree upon, celebrate and obey - plus religion may assist in behavioral regulation.
A spinoff is that religion has a cognitive prerequisite that grooming does not. Thus the appearance of religion may have helped to accelerate the evolution of the brain toward increasing intelligence, capacity for language (for telling myths), but also religious impressionability.

This, I think, is a very plausible explanation for religion.

But what implications does it have/(should have)?

[mistergreen77]

Another plausible explanation is do with development of thinking - at a certain point a species evolving intellligence must become aware of its own impending death. Perhaps this was paralyzing for the individual - everything becomes pointless unless this obstacle could be overcome. Some bright spark invents the idea of life after death and the problem is sovled - maybe at a later stage civilization begins to put the religous instinct to use and invents the last judgement as the ultimate penal code - guaranteeing that individuals will not try to cheat their way through the laws they have made for themselves.

Nietsche said 'In the mind of religious men, all nature is the sum of the actions of conscious and intentioned beings, an enormous complexity of arbitrary acts...The thinking of men who believe in magic and miracles is bent on imposing a law on nature; and in short religious worship is the result of this thinking...By entreaties and prayers...it is also possible to exert pressure on the forces of nature, by making them favourable inclined: love binds and is bound.'

I the theory you present is a plausible contender among many. Do you know if the evolutionary biologists have any evidence to support it?

[Maz]

I think that God was created to explain things that could not be explained othervice. I'll throw just one example which I think of right now...

There's group of apes/pre-homo sapiens living together. They have some simple rules, like do not **** the leader's female companion... However, two young pre-humans decide to do against the rule, hey, it's understandable, the leader's wifey is so hot, and she does not even wear pants...

Ok, they somehow get the female with them away with them (perhaps she saw the leader getting old, and thought that the best way to be Female Money (FM) number 1 was to make sure that these 2 promising yong males liked her...

Okay, first one prepares to take some action while second one stands in guard for others... It's dark and raining night, and he's quite nervous... Just when the the 1st monkey and FM1 start their game, lightning strikes to where they are... Unexplainable phenomena which kills these 2 rulebreakers...

Time passes, and the one who stood at guard has time to think... He tries to find explanation for thing that happened... Perhaps it was a punishment?

.
.
.

Who was the one that punished them? Surely not the leader, since I beat him next year, and took my position as a leader... If he could do such thing, he would have done the same to me....

There must be something...

Okay my loyal group, if you do not follow rules, *** hits you with lightning!

Oh well... This was just a thought. And it inherited features from both of your's posts ^_^
Both the group and fear of death were there... Perhaps...

[Zandrav Ibistenn]

@fadedmind:
Wouldn't that lead to much more variation in religion? Let's say that in one group, the cheeriest fellow is struck by lightning, while in another community the moodiest person in town is killed in precisely the same manner. Interpreted in the same way, the first group takes on a life of joyless asceticism, while the second generates a culture of hedonism.
To me, religion appears to follow a trend to seeking answers to questions unanswerable.
If relgious dogma was inspired by natural phenomena, I would expect to find more "wacky" examples, where cultures have tried to figure out what their deity (or deities) tried to tell them with apparently random display of its powers. Perhaps dangerous natural phenomena served more to reinforce belief than to actually dictate it. Most commonly, lack of rain when it was needed would have made the people think that the gods had been angry with them, and so they would make sacrifices to them, and then that would reinforce the belief in the gods.

Another plausible explanation is do with development of thinking - at a certain point a species evolving intellligence must become aware of its own impending death.

Yes that sounds reasonable, but there could be another dimension to it: Human offspring depend on their parents for much longer time than other animals, and much of human successfulness stems from our ability to fashion tools, making it important for knowledge to be passed from one generation to the next. Therefore the young human brain evolves to be naïve; believing everything it is taught by its parents. The religious parent then passes on their own belief system to their children, who then believes in it. That means that once religion gets in, it doesn't go away. Besides I find it strange that children are sometimes classified by their parents beliefs; this is catholic child, this is a muslim child etc. - and then they go to different schools.
Hmm, this approach to religion is quite pessimistic - if it is seen as a systematically indoctrinated belief system, then that makes it akin to an endemic pathogen.

Do you know if the evolutionary biologists have any evidence to support it?

I'm not familiar with the methods in evolutionary biology. I tend to think of it as a somewhat speculative field, but I think they make use of mathematical models, make certain assumptions, and look for statistically significant differences between groups working together in different ways, using said models.

[mistergreen77]

Seems like evolution reuses old forms for new purposes - whatever the original purpose religion served once it is established it evolved to have many different functions. Thus it makes it difficult to argue from utility to origin. Religion at an early stage might be useful in re-inforcing co-operative instincts like conscience and sense of group, but at even earlier stage it may be the attempt to control nature through ceremony and magic, like a primitive precursor and prerequisite for science. At an even later stage it becomes stopgap for science and finally it is hostile to science (because by discovering its history and purpose its authority is undermined). I sense some irony thinking about this.