Our evolved nature has many consequences. Moreover, the process of Biological Evolution takes many many generations to adapt to changes, far more than the rapid pace of civilisation allows. Thus one of my working hypotheses is that there is a significant discrepancy between the civilised human beings we need to be and the creatures we are evolved to be.

The Evolutionary Reason for Religion

At various points along our evolutionary history, some life-and-death-critical survival-of-the-species problems needed solving, and as such, solutions are encoded into our DNA. Later on, when the need is fulfilled by more advanced behaviours, the earlier solutions become redundant, but there is nowhere near the same evolutionary pressure to breed these behaviours out as there was to breed them in in the first place.

Moreover, once civilisation starts in earnest, human beings help each other survive on a massive scale, and with that, survival-of-the-species, which is Biological Evolution's cutting edge, is blunted. Evolution can't breed out behaviours if those people who exhibit such behaviours are enabled to survive by the kind of cooperation we see in civilisation. And if those behaviours aren't bred out, they persist. Those behaviours which persist, but which are unwanted or have no place in modern civilised society, can't be bred out, and so workarounds must be learned. Those workarounds need to be standardised, need to be essentially 'written in stone' to use the Biblical metaphor, and need to be taught to each and every generation. Those peoples which do this will prosper where other peoples will self-destruct. When it comes to the early books of the Bible, the Pentateuch (Genesis through to Deuteronomy), I see something like this. If we assume that the story of the Exodus is only slightly accurate, in that the ancient Jews found themselves in the middle of nowhere with no social structures and only their basic human instincts to work with, then some simple hard-and-fast break-these-and-we-stone-you-to-death rules are absolutely necessary. If you then think out what sort of rules you'd need, much of the Ten Commandments will find themselves staring back at you. Even the 'God stuff' is necessary as a psychological mechanism to ensure that people value obedience of the other rules more than they value their own lives.

The thing with civilisation, compared to a small tribe, is that in civilisation most people are strangers. In a small tribe, everybody knows each other. Putting fellow tribespersons first may come naturally, but putting strangers you've never met on equal footing to your own, and putting the overall collection of those strangers on a higher footing than your own, is most certainly not natural. Yet for civilisation to prosper, that is what we need. Bridging this gap between what we are evolved to be, and what we need to be, is precisely the reason why people have needed religions in the past, and why we still do. Some aspects of, say Christianity or Buddhism, defy reason, Those aspects we need to find new ways to look at, so that they solve their essential purpose. But I do think that starting with this 'what we need to be vs what we are evolved to be' discrepancy, much of the nature and features of religion arise quite naturally and logically, make a lot more sense, and equipped with this point of view we are far more able to separate the wheat from the chaff. (And whereas wheat needs to be carefully handled, chaff grows like weeds in an untended garden.)