Religion is a puzzle. It is easy to see from a look at the history of the many religions that at one time or another have hold or continue to hold sway within one or another of the equally diverse cultures that it has played an important, even a critical role in the ``civilization'' of mankind. Belief in God seems rooted in two aspects of the way our minds work that helped us evolutionarily bootstrap from animal to man, from a state of reflexive reaction to our immediate environment to reflective contemplation of our past, our present, and our future.
These two aspects (which are not cleanly separated, of course) are:
Nature at first glance appears chaotic and highly random. When a child is born it is as likely as not to play in the street, to fall down the stairs, to stick hairpins in electrical sockets (I myself did this last one at the age of two, getting third degree burns on all the fingers of my right hand in the process and doubtless confirming my destiny to one day become a physicist). We have no intrinsic knowledge of probability or the relationships between causes and effects. If you play in the street, cars will break your bones. If you do not keep your balance in high places, gravity will break your bones. If you place a thin piece of wire across two poles with 120 VAC potential difference and plenty of power-delivery capacity, that piece of wire will vaporize and in the process seriously damage the small fingers that hold it.
We can learn these relationships by abstracting the knowledge from experience and observation and instruction. Deer cannot - some twenty deer a year are killed on the highways with two miles of where I'm sitting as I type this. In order for deer to learn not to ``play in the street'' we have to evolve better deer by killing off generations of the ones that were too stupid to avoid being hit. Eventually either we'll end up with deer that instinctively shy away from black strips of rock or deer will get smart enough to flee from the mere sound of a car, but we aren't there yet.
This process of abstraction, the linking of a spaciotemporal chain of cause and effect, (and the mental hardware that enabled it to happen) proved extremely valuable from an evolutionary point of view to early humans. Survivors were the ones that discovered patterns in the seeming chaos and inferred causal rules from the patterns that were ``simple'' and could be taught to offspring. ``Don't play in the street.'' ``Watch that you don't fall down the stairs or jump out of trees.'' And yes, ``Put caps on unused electrical outlets when you have small children until you can teach them that electricity is dangerous,'' although this was maybe 1958 and alas, such caps had not yet been invented.
One way of viewing God, then, is as a side-effect of the rapid development of this capability in our brains. Cause was key, cause was all about survival, but the patterns of causality were often subtle and the world is highly chaotic and largely unpredictable, especially when many of the root causes for things were still hidden within the flood of seemingly unique but similar events. Our brains demanded explanations but could not find them all as they did not yet know how to conduct a systematic search. How natural, then, to create a ``super-cause'' and assign it its own capricious nature, one that closely mirrored our own. How easy, once this super-cause was imagined, to assign it as the root cause of any spurious or passing pattern observed by our ever more powerful pattern-abstraction engines.
Once nucleated in this way, religions almost immediately became major factors in the social co-evolution that was perhaps even more important than straight biological evolution in determining whose genes would live and whose would die. Humans in social groups, through cooperative enterprises, had outlived and outreproduced humans who did not since long before they were in any recognizable sense human. They already had social structure, pecking order, reproductive rights, and of course the all important transmission of discovered pattern information to their offspring without the requirement of each individual having to live through a close encounter with each possible fatal mistake to learn of them.
Sweetheart, don't play with the saber-toothed kitty even if it does look soft and cuddlesome. Snake may well taste like chicken, but watch for the end with the eyes and the fangs. That's the chief's woman, and looking cross-eyed at her when he's around will get your brains knocked out with a club.
Social groups with a hierarchical structure are by definition a pattern, and it was and continues to be very much an evolutionary advantage to extend and generalize patterns, so what could be more natural than to subsume the pattern-explaining cause known as ``God'' (or more likely, Gods plural) into the pattern of social hierarchy. Large predators and small snakes can ``understandably'' cause you to die, but nobody can quite understand why one day you can defy the risk and eat tasty snake, and the very next your hand slips or you come on one unawares and are transformed from a living, aware being into an inert lifeless mass that quickly rots or is eaten in turn. Randomness, the truly unpredictable, frightens us and rightly so. That which we don't know or understand can and will kill us, and so can that which we know or partly understand, leaving us hungry for the rest of the explanation so we can control it!
Causality, of course, is all about control. If we understand we can always kill the snake and arrange it so that it never kills us. We can wipe out sabertooths altogether so that they disappear as a risk to our selves and our children. We can figure out that it is a good idea to cover electrical sockets to eliminate the chance of an uncontrolled event causing a tragedy and reducing one of our beautiful, sweet children to a pile of corruption or a small vase filled with ash.
If God is a universal cause, a super-cause, the explanation for `why here' and `why now', then should we not seek to control this cause too? Our pattern recognition facilities are always at work, and transferring patterns from one domain to another. When we note that our tribal chief (or any other ``random'' bully) is perhaps less likely to brain us when we praise him extravagently, less likely to brain us when we regularly give him some of our possessions, more likely to reward us with similar privileges of our own when we are strong supporters in the social hierarchy, how natural that we continue the hierarchy on to God, to seek to control God by means of praise, of sacrifice, by being good members of a religious hierarchy that (of course) is entertwined with the social secular hierarchy and supports it because it works better that way from the point of view of survival.
Of course we as a species have, fairly recently as these things go, transcended this complex social-religious pattern. Since the Enlightenment, our understanding of the physical universe has blossomed to where we now understand how everything works. Sure, there are details we are still working on, and we are still trapped in a chaotic universe where much that happens (for all of our deep understanding of how it happens) is unpredictable, but in recent years we have come to understand even that, to be able to quantify its unpredictability as it were. We can take random number generators (that are not at all random, of course) and put them to work inside simple, ultimately entirely deterministic algorithms and produce with computers patterns that are compellingly similar to the ones we observe in nature - snowflakes and trees, erosion patterns and fingerprints, even the mystery of how the brain itself works is slowly yielding to the inexorable advance of science, as one experiment after another, one insight after another extends our understanding to ever more subtle and complex phenomena.
The Enlightenment also brought into being the idea of religious freedom as it became more and more apparent that large parts of accepted religious belief were (to put it bluntly) simply wrong. However strongly these beliefs formed the core of a system of social and cultural rules that was our society at the time, they just plain turned out not to be the case, to directly contradict every observation made of the actual Universe in which we live.
In other work1.1 I explore in considerable detail both what went right and what went wrong on this process, and how in spite of some of the philosophical problems that were discovered during the Enlightment we can have a mostly rational view of the Universe with a reasonably sound and consistent basis for what we call knowledge. The purpose of this work is different. In it, I wish to proffer a social polemic against the surviving negative aspects of the world's primary religions.
Not all of aspects of religion are negative, mind you. They do great good as well as great evil. However the parts that are negative are almost without exception insane as well, in the sense that they are either indefensible physical constructs that directly contradict what we have learned from the defensible system of post-Enlightenment science and knowledge or they are anthropomorphic extrapolations and projections of human social structures onto that which we call God. Some of the latter are very good - they have provided an ethical foundation for human culture without which civilization could never have emerged. Some of the latter are deeply evil, and lead to strife, conflict, and much human suffering. Let us try to understand this.