Where did religious and spiritual beliefs come from? The answer to this question depends on your own belief system. The position of some people who are not religious echoes Sigmund Freud and, more recently, Richard Dawkins: Religion is primarily a pathological mistake made by the brain. Others with a less negative view consider religion to be a constructive creation of the brain. People holding the latter view might claim that evolutionary forces affected the human brain in such a way that it created religion as a means to better adapt to the world around us. Can evolution explain why the human brain supports religious beliefs? I argue that although explanations that focus on how brain structures and functions have evolved may provide important information regarding the raison d’être of religion, this “neuroevolutionary” approach can be limited.
One problem with this approach to religion is the difficulty in discerning the element or elements that are adaptive—that undergo change to enhance the probability of survival. For instance, different models have focused on the sense of control over the world that religion helps us to achieve, religion’s provision of social cohesiveness and moral foundations, its potential physical and mental health benefits or its utility in providing answers to questions that we cannot fathom. Still other theorists cite the importance of religious and spiritual experiences as primary evolutionary sources of religion.
A religious perspective challenges all of these neuroevolutionary approaches by reversing the causal arrow’s direction: Perhaps religious belief causes the brain to change rather than the other way around.
A religious individual looks outward for religion’s origin. Thus, the most common answer is straightforward: Religion comes from God. For a religious individual, it is no surprise that religion and spirituality are a part of the human brain—a God who provided human beings with no physiological way of having any kind of relationship with God would leave us with a fundamental theological problem. This explanation holds that religious beliefs originate with God, but thereafter, the human brain takes over to determine how we manifest those beliefs in our religious and spiritual practices. So, while an understanding of the brain may help us better comprehend how we become religious or spiritual, the brain ************SPAM/BANNEAR************ constrains or directs us toward those beliefs; it does not create them. This argument also helps explain why each religion has a different perspective on the meaning and nature of God, particularly God’s relationship to human beings.
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