Is belief in God a basic instinct?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we live under our parents' roof for 20-30 years, then we move out, apparently as grown, mature adults. And responsible, Ha!

The image of god is that of a protective father-figure. Watching over us, with an imaginary arm round our shoulders. To many, it's comforting. Then there's Mother Mary, nicest woman in the world. The 'purest' mother (virgin), since she 'never' did the nasty. All paintings of 'her' show a meek, humble, soft and perhaps subservient beautiful woman.
When you think about it, they're essentially Super Parents. A father who isn't just mighty, but Almighty, and a God, nonetheless, who trumps all other gods. "Our god is the best!"

Our propensity to believe in gods goes way back to our ancestors' belief in the gods of thunder, rain, sun, wind, snow, clouds, temperature, trees, etc etc. They were worshipped by ignorant people, who, in all fairness, didn't know any better. A solar eclipse would have drove them crazy.

All it took was an astute, business minded, power-hungry individual to see the market for organised religion and BOOM!-> Organised Religion.

Jesus was the Richard Branson of his time. Virgin Heirlines.

Its a cultural meme, Edward Taylor argues that the primordial form of religion was animism, it allowed humans to makes sense of death and allowed the attribution of souls to both landscapes and people. Once this idea had been conceived numerous competing ideologies formed in order to best explain it. The meme with selective advantage will survive.

New religions take on traits from older religions which they believe will best benefit its membership and that is why most religious practices can be traced back to previous religions.

Oscar Wilde put it more elegantly;

Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved, and the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the southern parts of Europe in our own day. The old fable that the Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names has more truth in it than the many care to discover.

Fear of death is a basic instinct. Belief in god is not.

I think it is a confluence of a number of features that people have touched on:

- Over-active agency seeking: Evolutionarily speaking it is a much safer bet to assume agency where there is none rather than vice versa. Assuming a tiger is in the bushes when there is none: You look silly. Assuming a tiger is not in the bushes when there is one: Eaten. Extrapolate these features to the big picture and the brain intuits the presence of someone behind it all.

- Social bonding and the preservation of culture: The tribe with a religion - rituals, songs, dances, shared myths and principles, social structure - has a big advantage over the one that doesn't.

- Authority-oriented thinking: We intuitively analyse social status amongst ourselves, whether that is to boss people around or being happy being led, or switching around depending on circumstances, we tend to assume someone is at the top...but your Dad or the priest isn't quite as high as one can go, is it?

- Existential angst: One side-effect of self-awareness and abstract thinking is the realisation of mortality and purposeless. We don't like this and our bias towards positive thinking leads to assuming that we're not mortal and that we have a purpose.

- Memetics: Thoughts and ideas fight with each other for prominence and survival in society. Some are better at it than others, and the ones that learn to stick around tend to stick around for a very long time, and have a number of ingenious adaptive and defensive features that keep them going.

- Pareidolia: The brain seeks out patterns, and can be over-active doing it. This relates a lot to agency seeking. Better to assume the presence of a non-existent feature, plan or pattern than to miss one that does exist.

That's it in a nutshell. It's a big gooey, irrational, hypocritical mess of all of those things. Most people tend to focus on one or two of them, but I think they all play a role. I suppose morality is a factor too, but the way religion handles morality I would say that it is simply a feature of their approach to authority.

EDIT: Typos.

Lon Dubh wrote: »

Is belief in God a basic instinct?

Not directly but I think it is indirectly related to many things that are.

An analogy often used is if you imagine asking "Is catching the common cold a basic function of human biology?". Clearly it is not. Why would evolution select for catching a virus?

What does happen in evolution however is that the Virus is selected for it's ability to use aspects of the human condition that have evolved for other reasons. Belief in god is likely very similar.

For example we have what is called "The Intentional Stance" and "Agency Detection" which Evolution has selected for. This is that we see agency before we see no agency. And we evaluate the intentions... especially towards ourselves and our loved ones... of any agency.

The evolutionary selection there is clear. You are more likely to die by detecting no agency where there is some and being wrong than detecting too much agency and being wrong.

Further our evolved ability to "put ourselves in the other shoes" means our brain has the ability to represent others and run "test scenarios". "I wonder if she knows that I know that she knows I lied" is a simple enough sentence but the ability to represent in our minds the minds and scenarios of others in order to visualize it is astounding really.

And it does not stop with the minds of others. We have a penchant for personifying and representing in our minds things like emotions, inanimate objects, facts of life like death and even the universe itself. This ability has led to great art, literature, folklore and folktales and more. However all one must do is take that one step too far and start thinking the personifications real and suddenly you have gods and the like to contend with.

We are also a pattern seeking animal which is good but we are over active in that and see patterns that are not there or draw patterns in our minds from incomplete data sets. Much superstition comes from this fact alone.

So no I see no reason to think that god belief is directly an instinct but I can very much visualize ways in which it can act like a memetic virus utilizing things that are natural to us in order to perpetuate itself.

What I have certainly never been shown in my life is even the first reason to think that god belief is in any way based on any arguments, evidence, data or reasoning that is actually available to us or can be presented by any one person to another. I have been asking theists for such for 18+ years now to no avail. Literally nothing is forthcoming.