Complex societies evolved without

belief in all-powerful deity

nature.com (http://www.nature.com/news/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-
all-powerful-deity-1.17040) by For Authors March 4, 2015

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Emergence of politically sophisticated societies may be assisted by faith in

supernatural spirits, but does not need "big God" religion.

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Statues of Ki'i gods form part of the politically complex polytheistic society
evolved by native Hawaiians.

All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to

wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other
aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example,
belief in a "big God" an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral
judgement on our actions has been instrumental in bringing about social and
political complexity in human cultures.

But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia the network of small

and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island challenges that
theory. In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did
tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme
deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed.
Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in
New Zealand, who worked on the study, wanted evidence to examine the idea
that "big Gods" drive and sustain the evolution of big societies. Psychologist Ara
Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has
suggested that belief in moralizing high gods (MHGs) enabled societies to
outgrow their limited ability to police moral conduct, by threatening freeloaders
with retribution even if no-one else noticed their transgressions, .

The most common examples of religions with MHGs Christianity and Islam,
the dominant representatives of so-called Abrahamic religions are relatively
recent and obviously postdated the appearance of complex societies. But the
question is whether earlier MHGs, for example in Bronze Age civilisations,
catalysed sociopolitical complexity or resulted from it.

Rather than searching for statistical associations between social complexity and
religious beliefs, researchers need ways to untangle cause and effect, Watts says.
Austronesian cultures offer an ideal sample to test theories about the evolution
of religions in pre-modern societies, because they were mostly isolated from
modern world religions, and their indigenous supernatural beliefs and practices
were well documented," he says.

Wide variety

Watts and his colleagues pruned the 400 or so known Austronesian cultures
down to 96 with detailed ethnographic records, excluding any in which contact
with Abrahamic religions might have had a distorting outside influence. They
range from native Hawaiians, who hold polytheistic beliefs, to the Merina people
in Madagascar, who believe in a supreme God.

The team considered two classes of religion: MHGs and a broader belief in
systems of supernatural punishment (or 'BSP') for social transgressions, such as
those enacted through ancestral spirits or inanimate forces such as karma.
Although both schemes see religious or supernatural agents as imposing codes
of moral conduct, BSP does not assume a single supreme deity who oversees that
process.

Six of the cultures had MHGs, 37 had BSP belief systems and 22 were politically
complex, the researchers concluded. They used trees of evolutionary connections
between cultures, deduced from earlier studies of linguistic relationships, to
explore how the societies were inter-related and exchanged ideas. That in turn
allowed them to test different hypotheses about MHGs and BSPs for example,
whether belief in MHGs precedes (and presumably then stabilizes) the
emergence of political complexity.

Although beliefs in MHGs do coevolve with political complexity, [the] beliefs

follow rather than drive political complexity, the researchers say. For BSPs,
however, the beliefs seem to help political complexity to emerge, although by no
means guarantee it.

I think the ordering of events these authors prefer is what one expects from first
principles, says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel of the University of Reading,
UK. He says that societies became more politically complex as networks of trade
and reputation emerged, and that the key to this process was language, not
religion.

So what are MHGs for? They are tools of control used by purveyors of religion
to cement their grip on power, says Pagel. As soon as you have a large society
generating lots of goods and services, this wealth can be put to use by someone
who can grab the reins of power. The most immediate way to do this is to align
yourself with a supreme deity and then make lists of things people can and
cannot do, and these become morals when applied to our social behaviour.
Anthropologist Hervey Peoples at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that
there is good evidence that, even if MHGs do not drive political and social
complexity, they can affect and stabilize it. This study is impressive and
innovative, but may be hard to generalize, she adds.

Norenzayan agrees. "In Austronesia, social and political complexity has been
limited", he says. "There have been cases of chiefdoms but there has not been a
single state-level society. So it's not all that surprising that big moralizing gods
don't play a central role." He argues that such gods did co-evolve with the very
large, state-level societies typically found in Eurasia. The "big Gods" idea was
never supposed to hold true everywhere, he says.

Journal name:
Nature
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nature.2015.17040

References
1.

Watts, J. et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 282, 20142556 (2015).

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Norenzayan, A. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and

Conflict (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).

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 Norenzayan, A. & Shariff, A. F. Science 322, 5862 (2008).

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Related stories and links

From nature.com
Societies evolve in steps
(http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1
038/news.2010.537)
13 October 2010

Morals don't come from God

(http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1
038/news.2010.55)
08 February 2010

Religious concepts promote cooperation

(http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1
038/news070723-6)
 038/news070723-6)
25 July 2007

From elsewhere
Joseph Watts home page
(http://www.josephwatts.org/)
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Philip Ball

Philip is a freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature. He

can often be heard on radio and television, and is the author of several
scientific books for the lay reader, including H2O: A Biography of Water
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nature.com (http://www.nature.com/news/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-
all-powerful-deity-1.17040) by For Authors March 4, 2015