If we were developing a theory of religion, how should we define religion for scientific purposes?

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So, the very excellent book, Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong delves into the neurological underpinnings of religion. Essentially, the human brain has three main structures. One responsible for survival, one responsible for modeling the thought processes of other humans and animals, and one responsible for thinking. The parts responsible for survival and modeling in our current existence mostly play a subconscious role but in prehistoric humanity, it was the thinking part that got expressed the least.

Humans didn’t evolve instincts sufficient to hunt and kill prey, so we had to learn how to do it. In order to effectively hunt an animal you have to understand it. What happens as you understand something more and more? You develop empathy towards it. Humans came to love the very animals they were killing and eating for food.

This creates quite a bit of cognitive dissonance that needed to be resolved. Enter the thinking part of the brain. The thinking part of the brain takes, on one hand, the need to kill and eat to survive, and, on the other, our growing love and empathy for these creatures, and works hard to reconcile them. What it inevitably comes up with, in all tribes, all societies around the world, is a justification in the form of divine command.

Other animals do not need this reconciliation, they can hunt and kill and eat with no remorse towards their prey. Animals feel emotions, but the emotions do not get in the way of their survival because they don’t have the same level of development in their prefrontal cortexes as we do.

Humans, due to our big, powerful brains, need justification. Religion provides us with that. If you keep reading Armstrong’s book, you see that this need of ours is directly involved in the building and continuance of civilization. The whole “divine right of kings” is just more of this religious justification for doing hard, ugly things to people that don’t deserve it in order to preserve survival.

Of course, religion serves far more roles in society than just granting kings the right to be extreme assholes. It served as the underpinnings of trade and cooperation. It’s impossible to build a better world for your children if you can’t trust your neighbors. Religion provided a common culture so that people could cooperate given their shared values.

Those are the two main roles religion played for humanity up until modern times. Now that those roles are no longer necessary, religion has taken a back seat. It turns out people prefer to create their own meaning in life rather than to allow shared cultural and religious ideas define who they are. Religion, even to the religious, bears so little resemblance to what it was like even a hundred years ago, that we can effectively declare that mode of life dead. No one even remembers what it’s like anymore to live in a truly religious society.

How I would define religion, in evolutionary terms, is as a cultural adaptation similar to tool use in crows. It faded somewhere around fifty to a hundred years ago due to lack of any real purpose. Crows don’t use tools if there’s nothing to do with them, and we no longer need to reconcile the gross application of violence onto the undeserving for the purposes of survival.

What’s taken its place is a somewhat different adaptation that serves a different purpose, spirituality. Spirituality specifically deals with meaning and purpose. How does one create these things in a world where none is given to you. In the old world, survival gave people meaning. But now that survival is mostly guaranteed, we must find meaning in other ways. The survival part of our brain is less involved. We don’t have to kill the undeserving for survival, at least, we don’t have to watch our factory farms doing awful things to beautiful creatures. So spirituality revolves between the modeling part of our brains, that part that creates empathy, and our thinking part.