Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 June 15

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June 15

Reasons for the prevalence of religiousness

Why there's been a historical prevalence of religiousness and animism over irreligion and atheism across most ethnic groups and cultures? Is it ultimately rooted in certain physiological features of human brain or other reasons? For what it's worth, I can't recall any ethnic group that has been traditionally irreligious/non-spiritual, maybe there is. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 18:24, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

There are far too many theories to include in one answer. Two very common trends are explanation of observations in the world and an ease for fear of death. Any specific answer will be supported by a stack of books over here, but then rejected by a stack of books over there. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 19:17, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

One theory: Evolutionary origin of religion; and Evidence of biological basis for religion in human evolution. --136.54.99.98 (talk) 22:22, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

A weakness of the latter study is that it does not account for the possibility that the pathways in the human brain are shaped by their (secular or religious) belief system, instead of the other way around. Theoretically, a longitudinal study including enough participants for some atheists to be converted to religious believers and some others to make the opposite transition could shed more light on the issue.  --Lambiam 10:25, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I seriously doubt that's the way the brain works. Cambalachero (talk) 15:02, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I've been reading The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons which has five or six pages about Paul Bach-y-Rita in a chapter about neuroplasticity generally. This mentions Bach-y-Rita's father being paralysed after a stroke and learning to walk again, which is said to be by rerouting necessary information around damaged parts of the brain, using an indirect route: and regarding blind people, it discusses pathways in the brain (in the white matter) being shaped by available visual information (whether it comes in through the ears, the tongue or the skin of the forehead). More recently there's been much talk about the use of hallucinogens to enhance brain plasticity to treat depression. So I don't see why "the theory of mind brain network" (I'm mildly surprised that neuroscientists have located such a sophisticated thing within typical brain anatomy, I mean I'm surprised by the implication that it has a standard shape or location) shouldn't be strengthened by some form of practice, such as believing in being constantly monitored a personal God, amenable to supplication.

But anyway the given link is not to the study suggesting any connection, but to a follow-up study, where it was found that the amount of activation was not different in religious as compared to non-religious subjects, so you might be right.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:54, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Quoting from the Abstract of the study: "First, we hypothesized that regions involved in theory of mind (ToM) are located upstream the causal flow and drive non-ToM regions, in line with theories attributing religion to the evolution of ToM. Second, we hypothesized that differences in directional connectivity are associated with differences in religiosity." A quote from the Conclusions section: "This study demonstrated how insights gained by Granger connectivity analysis inform us about the causal binding of individual regions activated during religious belief processing. [...] These processes are dynamic and constantly inform each other at multiple levels; this cross feeding of information varies among individuals in association with their religiosity."^[1] In both quotes, the emphasis by underlining is mine.  --Lambiam 19:45, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Very beautiful... except for the (link's) title, which looks like words were placed out of order. I can indeed refer to your initial remark above. --Askedonty (talk) 20:15, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I got it backward, this one is the follow-up. Here's a publicly accessible version on the NIH site.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:11, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

There's the God helmet and related article Neuroscience of religion. (The implication here is that humans have an inherent chance to get religion because humans have temporal lobes.)  Card Zero  (talk) 11:15, 16 June 2023 (UTC)