Science
28 August 2015:
Vol. 349 no. 6251 pp. 918-922
DOI: 10.1126/science.349.6251.918
Vol. 349 no. 6251 pp. 918-922
DOI: 10.1126/science.349.6251.918
- Feature
Birth of the moralizing gods
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.summary
Today's most successful religions have
one thing in common: moralizing gods that care about how people treat
one another and
will punish those who are selfish and cruel. But
for most of human history, these "big gods" were the exception. If
today's
hunter-gatherers are any guide, for thousands of
years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly indifferent to the
human
realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly.
Now, to crack the mystery of why and how people around the world came to
believe
in moralizing gods, researchers are using a
novel tool in religious studies: the scientific method. By combining
laboratory
experiments, cross-cultural fieldwork, and
analysis of the historical record, an interdisciplinary team has
proposed that
belief in judgmental deities was key to the
cooperation needed to build and sustain large, complex societies. And
once big
gods and big societies existed, their moralizing
deities helped religions as dissimilar as Islam and Mormonism to spread
by
making groups of the faithful more cooperative
and therefore more successful. Critics say the big gods team is
projecting
modern values onto ancient cultures, and that
belief in moralizing deities is a byproduct of other social changes. To
settle
the debate, researchers are looking for
quantitative data in novel places, including the historical record.
