Abstract
What if religion is more than a system of belief and worship (myth and ritual), used as a spiritual path or a politician’s manipulative tool? What if it is more essentially a neurobiological imperative that evolved as a key human survival strategy? My argument begins with the neurobiology of perception, in which the brain is wired to construct the world we experience as an act of subconscious storytelling. If we are to survive, these perceptual stories must tell us what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how we should respond. From this perspective, myth is not merely Scott Atran’s “counterintuitive and counterfactual world of supernatural agents.” It is also the form of storytelling that communities must share in order to work together to meet their survival challenges. With myth, those communities can represent the invisible forces that challenge them – from the death of a child to a decade of abundance, being conquered to healing a community member’s illness – in symbols such as the gods, and remember how they have done so in the past. This paper illustrates this neurobiological theory of myth with examples of how it functioned as a cultural survival strategy, especially in both the Axial Age and Modernity. It concludes with the speculation that, by answering the three perceptual questions individuals must answer, for societies as wholes, myth functions as a critical component in the process of cultural evolution.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Myth, Neurobiology, Cultural Evolution, Axial Age, Modernity
