The origins of religion
The human way of life is older than Homo sapiens. Religion probably included.
A few months ago I announced my intentions to write a book. I’m working on it. I also received the advice to publish during the course of work. So I’m working on my too. This is the first piece of a series that will hopefully, eventually, some time be a coherent book on the origins of civilization.
The fundamental idea is that technological and social development is not a built-in feature in humans. I outlined this in my post Violent Enough to Stand Still. Humans are perfectly capable of living under a condition of stasis. Development toward higher levels of complexity is just something that has happened under exceptional circumstances. One implication of this hypothesis is that the history of the lifestyle we call human might be very old. Much older than Homo sapiens.
This chapter is about why religion is likely to be significantly older than Homo sapiens. It is divided into two parts: One about what happened, and did not happen, before Homo sapiens. One about how religion specifically is likely to have evolved within this pre-Homo sapiens timeframe.
The origins of humans
About two million years ago, a hominin with a skeleton almost identical to that of modern humans evolved. Although its averages differed a bit from the modern average, it was within the range of modern humans. Its height ranged from 1.4 to 1.8 meters. Its chest was a bit deeper on the horizontal level.1
Since we only know about the skeleton of Homo erectus, details like facial traits, body fat and hairiness are subject to speculation and art. It is either possible to imagine Homo erectus as slightly stocky members of Homo sapiens with bigger faces and lower foreheads. Or they can be imagined as apes on human frames.
The big difference between Homo erectus and modern people was the head: Homo erectus had heads that were smaller, and had much lower foreheads with thick browridges. The brain volume was smaller than in modern humans, ranging from 850 to 1250 cubic centimeters (the normal range for modern humans is 1100-1600 cubic centimeters, so there is still an overlap with modern humans).
Homo erectus also had denser bones than the average modern human. But on the whole, from the neck down, Homo erectus mostly looked like a modern human.
In his 2009 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primatologist Richard Wrangham makes the case that Homo erectus from the beginning lived the life of a human, not that of an ape. He reasons that the body of a present-day human requires the use of fire. Herbivorous species that do not use fire need to spend about five hours a day chewing, divided into several sessions with a couple of hours of resting in between. For this activity they need bigger stomachs and bigger mouths than Homo erectus had. Like Australopithecus, the upright, ape-headed probable ancestor of us. It walked upright, but had big bellies and jaws similar to those of a chimpanzee. It was also shorter than any now-living humans, between 100 and 150 centimeters.
Wrangham argues that Homo erectus can’t have achieved its human build only from hunting, because digesting raw meat is very difficult for humans. Also, such a small and defenseless creature would need fire in order to sleep on the ground. Furthermore, hunting depends on the leisure that easily digestible vegetable food provides. Human hunters can take the risk of not catching anything on a particular day, because they have gatherers that provide dense, easily digestible food for them. If the food the gatherers provided were raw, the hunters would have needed to spend numerous hours every day chewing it, with pauses for digestion. Such a diet would have required hunters to be back at camp at midday, in order to spend the afternoon and evening chewing and digesting. Although chimpanzees like meat, they only attempt to hunt for shorter periods, because they can’t afford to spend hours without feeding. And when they manage to catch a monkey or any other small prey, they find it difficult to chew.
In summary, Wrangham argues that cooking was necessary for a creature with the physiognomy of Homo erectus to evolve. And he reasons that cooking requires a certain social structure: Females who cook for themselves and their children are very vulnerable to getting robbed by strange males. That situation incentivizes males to take the role as protectors/exploiters of certain females: in exchange for food and sexual access for themselves, they protect a female against food theft and sexual aggression. Those males could also share meat they obtained with their protected females and the children they could assume that they had fathered. In other words, Richard Wrangham reasons that Homo erectus and the social structure we know as human evolved more or less at the same time.
As Richard Wrangham pointed out in his later book The Goodness Paradox, the lineage that became Homo sapiens sapiens evolved traits that are typical for domesticated species: Lighter build, bigger heads, flatter faces2. As Wrangham suggests in Catching Fire, this evolution of the human intellect does not need to have preceded the human condition. It is more likely to have been the effect of the human condition. A human-like lifestyle with cooking and slightly polygynous, possessive pairbonds might be possible with significantly less IQ than that of modern humans and should have led to both pressures and opportunities for higher intelligence. If nothing else from the socially complex competition between males for females that tends to be the case among humans.
Nothing happened, nothing happened, something happened
Homo erectus’s modern human build evolved for walking. And walk they did! It has been difficult for archaeologists to understand the origins of Homo erectus, because almost as soon as fossils are turning up in Africa, they are turning up in Asia as well, as far as Indonesia. Curiously, Homo erectus or an even earlier human species also reached the Philippines, maybe about 800 000 years ago, and evolved to Homo luzonensis. To get there, they probably had to cross several kilometers of open water. Something similar happened at the Indonesian island of Flores, where small-sized, small-brained hominids lived from about 800 000 years ago until about 50 000 years ago. 800 000 years ago, their ancestors probably had to cross 19 kilometers of open water to get to the island.3
About 1.7 million years ago, the Achaulean tool tradition emerged. It is most of all known for its double-sided handaxes. The Achaulean tradition was developed in Africa and quickly spread over the world.4 Then basically nothing happened in the making of stone tools. For more than a million years.5
From their emergence almost two million years ago, Homo erectus very slowly got bigger heads. Early specimens had a cranial capacity of 600 to 800 cubic centimeters. The late specimens most often had cranial capacities well in excess of 1000 cubic centimeters, which is within the range of humans today.6 Whatever they used those bigger brains for, it was not making better stone tools
Half a million years ago things started to happen more rapidly. From 500 000 years ago, brains started to grow at a faster rate. From about 400 000 to 250 000 years ago, a new, more sophisticated tool making industry arose, called the Levallois industry. In contrast to the previous, very long-lasting Achaulean industry, it used flakes and not only cores for tools. Subsequent more advanced stone tool production modes followed. A hundred thousand years ago, three separate lineages of humans with brains as big as those of modern humans had evolved: Homo sapiens in Africa, Neanderthal humans in Europe and Denisova humans in Asia. Also Homo erectus in East Asia evolved brains up to 1200 cubic centimeters, for example Peking Man. The science of the archaic human family tree is not entirely clear. Newer research indicates that the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthal humans and Denisova humans might have lived as early as a million years ago.7 Whenever the lineages split, bigger brains evolved simultaneously in hominids in three, maybe four different places, independently of each other.
This is an indication that the evolution of Homo sapiens in a more intelligent direction was not a coincidence. Evidently, there was an evolutionary pressure in favor of larger brains. The brain-size increase that began 500 000 years ago is usually attributed to the climate becoming both more variable and more extreme over that period. This might have set humans onto a path into development: Periods of a more favorable climate allowed larger brains to evolve. When the climate deteriorated again, larger-brained individuals had an advantage in the struggle over dwindling resources.
When was religion invented?
Could some of the brain growth of Homo erectus during its one and at half million year reign have been used for creating, maintaining and developing religion?
Religion is the attribution of human-like intention outside of humans. That is the simplest and most comprehensive definition. Polytheistic spirits and monotheistic, all-powerful gods have this in common: They possess intentions similar to those of humans. From the perspective of science, religion is the misattribution of intention to where there are no observable reasons to attribute intentions.
When did this misattribution begin?
The archeological record can’t tell. About 70 000 years ago, a group of Homo sapiens made a giant python head from stone in a cave in Africa. No traces of everyday life have been found in that cave, indicating that it was used as a center for ritual. In general, scientists guess that the use of red ochre pigment was used as a component in rituals. Traces of use of red ochre have been found from 400 000 years ago. Also Neanderthal people used red ochre.8
There is one good reason to believe that religion is much older than the python cave: It is universal among humans. Several people have made this argument about the origins of language: Grammar seems to be a universal human feature. The Bushmen of the Kalahari diverged from other humans between 200 000 and 300 000 years ago. Still, their language had the word structure of subject-verb-object, just like English or Mandarin.9 Another argument that has been made is that if linguistic ability evolved independently among Bushmen and other humans, it would have diverged more between groups of humans. So language must have evolved before the human race split into branches.10
For the same reason, religion should have evolved before the split of the current human race. Among groups of humans, religion is more or less as universal as language.11 There is no known pre-modern group of humans that believes in human-like intention solely in human bodies. Humans in simple societies everywhere, on every continent, believe that nature is filled with spirits.
There can only be three reasons behind that.
1. There actually are spirits living in nature. Those of us who fail to see them have just lost our ability to see things.
2. Religion evolved before the human race split into its current branches.
3. Belief in spirits is so useful that it evolved independently at different places, the way agriculture did.
The uniformity of human religious belief speaks against hypothesis 3. In a study of religion among hunter-gatherers, 100 percent of groups studied, in different continents, held animistic beliefs.12 The universality and persistence of such fundamentally absurd13 beliefs on different continents over tens of thousands of years makes such coincidences unlikely. Without an innate propensity toward believing that the world is inhabited by spirits, religions would have taken the same path as languages, diverging further and further from each other, with only a few grammatical principles in common. This is not the case. People all over the world believe very similar things, when at similar stages of social complexity.
Apostles of nature
From that doesn’t follow that every human carries a propensity to believe in human-like intentionalism outside of humans. It might be enough if only a small proportion of individuals actually perceive the supernatural and transmit their impressions to the wider population.
In modern human populations, about four percent of people are believed to fulfill the criteria of schizotypal personality disorder. Schizotypals are socially withdrawn and have trouble interacting with people. But the most characteristic symptom is that schizotypals tend to think in magical terms. Right here, in a society that encourages realism and science above all, they still persist in seeing supernatural patterns of meaning. A summary of the diagnostic criteria:
Ideas of reference (incorrect interpretations of causal incidents or events as having an unusual meaning specifically for the person)
Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms
Odd thinking and speech, such as vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped.
Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation.
Inappropriate or constricted affect.
Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar.
Lack of close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives.
Excessive social anxiety does not diminish with familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgments about self.14
That is, to this day, a minority of people are very creative when attributing intention. Curiously enough, there are scarcely any modern books that describe the condition. But there is a Reddit subforum where people with schizotypal traits can describe what reality looks like for them.
It is widely recognized that hallucinations and delusions exist on a spectrum.15 Hallucinations as such are reported to appear in a significant minority of people.16
Among those people there is a spectrum regarding prevalence, pervasiveness, controllability and disturbingness of hallucinations. Unfortunately, only the most extreme end of this spectrum is well documented: The illness of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia only affects about 0.3 to 0.7 percent of the population, which is a small fraction of people reporting supernatural hallucinations and delusions. Since the severity of the condition makes it impossible to ignore, it is still much more talked about than more common hallucinatory conditions like schizotypal personality disorder.
Schizophrenic people are like schizotypal people on steroids. Schizotypal people perceive supernatural phenomena, to one or another degree. Schizophrenic people get engulfed in supernatural phenomena to the degree that they can no longer function in ordinary life. The supernatural experiences tend to come together with disorganized thinking, low moods and inefficiency.
The existence of schizophrenia is a puzzle to scientists, because it is both strongly influenced by genes and highly detrimental. It has been suggested that schizophrenia-causing traits are a bit like sickle-cells: Favorable in lower doses, in which they make people creative, detrimental in higher doses, in which they make people psychotic.
It is very possible that there is a correlation between creativity and delusional madness. Still, there is reason to doubt the theory that some extra scraps of creativity bring such great advantages to people that it can offset the damage caused by delusions and hallucinations. A more likely explanation is that damaging delusions are a by-product of useful delusions. And the limit between what is damaging and what is useful depends heavily on culture.
Is this shamanism?
Spontaneously, schizotypal personality disorder seems more useful than schizophrenia when it comes to the creation and maintenance of religion. Still, to my knowledge, a possible link between shamanism and schizotypal personalities has not been explored. Instead, in particular during the first half of the 20th century, a link between schizophrenia and shamanism was proposed. By that time, schizotypal personality disorder was not defined: it became a separate diagnosis only in 198017. That can be one reason why the schizotypal/shaman link has not been proposed on a wider scale: At the time when a milder version of supernatural thinking was clearly defined by psychologists, the idea of hallucinations as culturally useful was going out of fashion.
Critics of the schizophrenia/shaman theory say that shamans are not mad like people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the West.18 They point out that there are mad people in all societies and madness is recognized as madness also in societies that practice shamanism and encourage personal supernatural experiences.19
This is indeed true. For example, Helena Valero, a mestizo woman who was kidnapped by Yanomamö horticulturalists in the Amazon rainforest as a child and lived with them for 19 years, was married to a man called Akawe. Akawe was an unusually nasty person who maltreated his wives and raided and killed enemies with indifference. He also had at least one psychotic episode, in which he hallucinated over beautiful women who had come to take him away. He was shouting and biting so his friends and relatives had to tie him up. He remained that way day and night and refused to eat, until he became thin and weak. The shaman took hallucinatory snuff to scare away the spirits that haunted Akawe and he finally recovered into his ordinary state.20
Akawe was not a shaman. He was an afflicted person who was treated by a shaman. The Yanomamö attributed all illness, physical as well as mental, to malevolent spirits. Most people were only potential victims for spirits. A few people could cooperate and negotiate with those spirits. Those people were the shamans.
To my knowledge, only one book has been written about the inner life of a shaman: Spirit of the Rainforest by Mark Ritchie21. The book is the story of a top shaman called Jungleman. Jungleman both sees and hears his spirits at times. There is a supreme spirit called Charming, envisioned as a supremely beautiful woman. Jungleman was convinced that he killed the children of enemy tribes through sending his spirits on them.22
Shamans are not random people who experience hallucinations. But some people with hallucinations are considered suitable candidates for shaman training, and those of them who are successful in turning their hallucinations into socially constructive use are becoming shamans.23 We don’t know how many Westerners suffer from the kind of mental illness that would make them good candidates for that kind of training, because no such courses exist here. As one American with schizophrenia put it:
“Later the doctor told me that my entire experience with spiritual ecstasy and darkness was sick and irrational, and had no meaning whatsoever. Shamed, I stayed in the hospital for five months. ...I was defeated. I considered myself a complete and utter failure for the rest of my life.”24
Apart from medicines that are sometimes very effective and sometimes not, this kind of information is more or less all Western psychiatry has to offer people with severe hallucinations that take over their minds. There is no way to see it except as a failure. It has been widely observed that schizophrenia tends to be a less damaging psychiatric illness in a number of non-Western countries, for example India. There it is more common that people recover successfully from psychosis and that they experience less of the so-called negative symptoms of schizophrenia, that is, inability to do things and low moods. One reason that has been proposed is that many people with hallucinations are becoming more functional when they interpret their hallucinations as meaningful messages from another world that some of them even find possible to negotiate with25. The Hearing Voices Movement is an attempt to help Western people who hear voices handle their inner voices in such constructive ways.26
But also in the West, there are many people with hallucinations who are largely functional. One example is Elyn Saks, author of the memoir The Center Cannot Hold. Elyn suffers from lifelong schizophrenia. But apart from two years in her youth when the illness erupted, she has been highly efficient between her bouts of delusions and hallucinations. All through her life she has held an advanced job as a legal scholar and excelled in it. She claims that this is the case for many schizophrenics and that it is therefore wrong to tell people with schizophrenia to switch to menial jobs. Her episodes of delusions and hallucinations are highly disturbing to her, but they don’t make her incapable of functioning in society.27
At the Reddit forum for people with schizotypal personalities, a certain ambivalence is in the air. On the one hand, people speak of social isolation, strong levels of fear and anxiety and difficulties with everyday life. But they also speak of excitement and entertainment within their inner worlds.
In other words, perceiving the world as magical is not only fearsome. In societies that value schizotypal and psychotic people for their special senses of perception and imagination, all of those people aren’t necessarily dysfunctional the way they are in present-day Western society. In modern society, people with pervasive hallucinations often struggle to hold down a job. In primitive societies, there are good reasons to believe that men with tendencies to hallucinate were the best positioned for the only specialized trade there was: That of a shaman. In Yanomamö society, there were no artisans who were provided for by others for their skilled work. However, Jungleman seems to have gotten paid for his services. When the neighboring village turned Christian, Jungleman complained that they had become stingy:
“The people at Honey have always been good to me. And this visit was no different. Whenever I saw something I wanted I said, “Give me that and I’ll tell my spirits to keep you safe on the trail.” They knew that I could heal people, but even more, that I could make people sick and even kill them. So they always gave me what I wanted.
Now they were becoming rich because of the nabas [white people] living with them. It made me want to visit often. And my wives always enjoyed visiting their brother, Shoefoot, and other relatives.
But the next time when we visited, the Honey villagers wouldn’t give me everything I asked for. “Whatever has made you people turn so stingy?” I asked them.
“We’re not afraid of your power anymore,” Shoefoot said. It was shocking. Shocking! I taught this little big mouth all he knew about the spirits. How could he say that to me?
“You’re crazy! You are crazy!” My face bulged out at him.”All of you are crazy! Don’t you have any respect for the things we’ve always done? Don’t you remember that stingy people go to the fire pit? And you people have given me nothing!”
“That’s not true, brother-in-law,” Shoefoot said. “We have given you almost everything we have—all out of our fear that you would use your power against us if we didn’t. And you are welcome to come back any time. But now that we don’t fear your power any more, we won’t be giving you all our things like we have at other times. We are working hard here to live better. It’s not right for you to take all we’ve worked for. Even now we share our food and homes with you.”28
From that description it sounds like a powerful shaman was not just getting paid, but was getting paid more than most people.
Blind hitting
In spite of the constructive use of delusions and hallucinations, they most certainly cause a lot of damage to individuals in every society. Judging from memoirs written by Western schizophrenics and the various Reddit threads for schizotypal people, one culture (the mainstream Western) contains people with very differently themed hallucinations. With such variation, every hallucination that occurs at any given point can’t possibly be useful to any society.
To complicate things further, the function of delusions and hallucinations can not only be to serve the needs of religion. It is most likely also a high-risk strategy to achieve outstanding reproductive success on the individual level. I wrote about that in my posts The game: How delusions can make people excellent players and Madness is adaptive.
Both on the collective level and the individual level, genes that cause people to see reality in distorted ways are high risk, high gain. As I outlined in my post Civilization was built on madness: On the group level, the potential gain is the expansion of the group at the expense of other groups. And as soon as some groups have discovered this hack, delusions are not only an advantage. They become the baseline for continued existence. Surrounded by groups guided by useful delusions, no group can survive without delusions. That is a probable reason why both religion and people with unrealistic types of perception exist everywhere: Because no groups that do not possess them have been capable of surviving the competition with the others.
There is another indicator of the functionality of psychosis in the creation of religion: It is often provoked by stressful living conditions. Numerous types of stress have been shown to contribute to an increased risk of schizophrenia. The risk increases even before birth: The children of women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine of 1944 developed schizophrenia at up to twice the normal rate when they grew up.29 Finnish mothers who were pregnant when they learned their husbands were killed during the Winter War of 1939–1940 had children who were significantly more likely to develop schizophrenia when compared with mothers who learned about their husbands’ deaths after childbirth.30
Adverse childhood experiences like separation from a parent, abuse or trauma increases the risk of schizophrenia. So does having grown up in a city. There are also theories that a sense of victimhood contributes to the onset of schizophrenia. For example, being the victim of racial discrimination or a sense of social defeat or outsider status.31
In particular, people in certain fragmenting communities have been shown to experience very high rates of schizophrenia. In the UK, Afro-Caribbean people suffer rates of schizophrenia up to 6-9 times higher than the general population. This is not because people with Afro-Caribbean genes suffer high rates of schizophrenia. In the Caribbean, people are more or less as schizophrenic as the majority population of the UK. In general, migrants suffer elevated rates of schizophrenia, with an overall relative risk of 2.7 in first-generation migrants and 4.5 in second-generation migrants. Furthermore, African-Caribbeans residing in predominantly white neighbourhoods have a higher incidence of schizophrenia. This has been termed the ‘ethnic density’ effect.32
In other words: People who are, and perceive themselves to be, in a precarious situation, suffer a higher risk of psychosis. In particular, the migrant effects are interesting: When people perceive their group to be in a low-status, dispersed and disorganized state, they become psychotic at higher rates. As if humans evolved to become more psychotic in situations when a new religious awakening is badly needed.
One historical people that might have been in such a psychosis-inducing situation is the Aztecs. According to the Aztecs themselves, their ancestors constituted a small Nahuatl-speaking tribe called the Mexica which lived somewhere in northern Mexico. In 1122 C.E.the Mexica broke up from their homeland and started to wander south on the order of their supreme deity, Huitzilopochtli, in search of a promised land. Huitzilopochtli communicated directly with his high priests via dreams and profound trances. He gave them omens, prophecies, and navigational tools to reach their promised land and to avoid dangerous situations. At times Huitzilopochtli allowed the Mexica to establish towns and villages throughout the long journey of their migration, so they could rest for 10 to 20 years and increase their numbers before resuming the migration. The old, sick and weak could be granted permission by Huitzilopochtli to stay in these towns.
The search for the promised land continued for two centuries, until 1318. At last the Mexica arrived at Lake Tetzcoco (which is now mostly dry and the ground for Mexico City) and established themselves as fearless warriors and good farmers. But the god Huitzilopochtli was enraged at his people’s mediocre lifestyle and ordered them to come up with a plan to seize control of the entire area. The Mexica asked a powerful neighboring king for a union in marriage with his daughter. The king agreed to the union and sent his daughter to the Mexica. In a move that appears reckless beyond the level of psychosis, the Mexica killed the princess as a sacrificial offering to their supreme god Huitzilopochtli and showed off her remains at a banquet to which the king and his court were invited. The king commanded every single citizen to come out and battle in order to shed the blood of the Mexica, which were outnumbered and suffered heavy losses. Those who remained had to flee. Astonishingly, a few years later they founded the city of Tenochtitlan, which was to become one of the biggest cities in the world and the center of a great, bloodthirsty empire.33
Apparently, the Aztecs valued hallucinations and dreams very highly. They took existential risks in order to follow some of them. Their priests and others used hallucinatory substances.34 The question is: Was the migration of the Mexica such a time of rootlessness and upheaval that caused the kind of stress that increases the rate of psychosis in a population? That is of course difficult to know. But it wouldn’t be surprising if the described way of life caused stress of the kind that increases the risk of psychosis in many individuals. Some of those individuals could then contribute to the high demand for hallucinations.
The 19th century Xhosa were also in a precarious situation. They were in a century-long struggle with the Cape Colony over what was to become South Africa. In 1856, a 15-year-old orphaned girl called Nongqawuse told her uncle that she had met the spirits of two ancestors. The spirits had told her that the Xhosa should destroy their crops and kill their cattle. In return the spirits would sweep the European settlers into the sea and the dead would arise. The Xhosa would also get even better cattle and plenty of grain for their granaries. Nongqawuse’s uncle, himself a diviner, recognized his dead brother from Nongqawuse’s description of the spirits. Being the son of a counsellor of the Xhosa King Sarili kaHintsa, he alerted the king. The king destroyed his cattle and crops, causing thousands of his subjects to do likewise. The famine that followed devastated the last Xhosa Kingdom, forcing the Xhosa to turn to the neighbouring Cape Colony for food, blankets and other relief. 35 The cattle killing practices ended by early 1858. By then, more than 400 000 cattle had been killed. The population of British Kaffraria decreased from 105 000 to fewer than 27 000 due to the resulting famine.36
It is very likely that populations led through precarious situations by delusional people more often faced disasters like the Xhosa than spectacular successes like the Aztecs. But there are more than one great success story. In the western cultural sphere we have the highly successful example in Joan of Arc of 15th century France.
The link between hardship and the usefulness of supernatural delusions can be true on the individual and collective level simultaneously. Populations that experience hardship are more likely to need supernatural inspiration. And individuals who experience hardship compared to their peers are more likely to gain from the opportunity to become a shaman or an oracle or a sorcerer compared to individuals for whom life is going smoothly.
Another notable feature is the uncommonness of psychosis in children. Less serious psychotic symptoms appear to be more common in children than in teenagers.37 But debilitating psychosis that fulfil the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia before the age of 13 is very rare, only about 0.04 percent (to be compared to about 0.4 percent in the teenage and adult population).38
Why don’t children become psychotic? Maybe because there are very few circumstances under which psychosis can be useful in children. Without a certain set of life skills and a certain social standing, it is very difficult to convey a message from the divine.
Even in people of prime age and high social status and skills, the vast majority of hallucinations throughout history are likely to have gone to waste. The wide range of hallucinations of Westerners in the middle of the 20th century indicates that in ancestral societies, there were people with varying types of hallucinations. Far from all of those hallucinations should have been useful to their societies. But once in a while, an extremely well-placed set of hallucinations occurred in exactly the right person, taking the religious beliefs of the group to new heights. Such religion-founding hallucinations were so valuable that even groups with a lot of wasteful and detrimental hallucinations were more successful than groups with no or few hallucinations at all.
Genesis of fear
There is a general idea of religion as the result of abstraction. The origin of religion, and even language, is supposed to be the result of the evolution of abstract thought. The experiences of schizotypals contradict these ideas. A Reddit user wrote:
“do you ever wonder what its like to have a clear mind? do you ever wonder what its like to look at the grass, trees, sky, birds, stores, people, buildings, and not feel complete hopeless fear? i wonder it all the time”39
This person does not express that she fears everyday objects around her because of an abstraction. Rather, she seems to fear them instinctively, the same way that most of us fear snakes or terrorists. Or the same way that a mouse feels fear at the sound of a predator.
Fearing the grass and trees and the birds does not require more intelligence than fearing predators or aggressive co-specimen. It just requires another wiring. Such a wiring probably would only be evolutionarily successful in a species with a rather high degree of complexity. An individual who fears the grass can happen to turn up in any environment. It does take a particular environment for other people to be impressed by such a disposition. But in itself, a mental wiring that associates everything with the kind of danger predators pose does not require a sense of abstraction.
People with schizo-spectrum disorders attribute human-like intentions to non-human objects. If it were about imagination, that mental operation would have required abstraction. But it is not about imagination. It is about basic theory of mind. Or rather, a basic sense of mind. A sense of mind that perceives properties of human minds also where there are no human bodies.
All animals have some kind of sense of mind to deal with conspecifics. They need to recognize a conspecific and react appropriately to them. Sometimes they make mistakes, like when ducklings believe a non-duck to be their mother. Humans are no exceptions. And the human sense of mind is variable. Some people appear to live with the sense that they are the only ones who really have minds. They treat other people as some kind of background actors in the story about themselves. They assume themselves and everything they experience to be very special, as if they have missed that everyone has a personality analogous to their own. Conversely, some people perceive other human-like minds in the most unexpected places. In their own minds, or in the grass and the trees and furniture and cars.
Religion did not start with abstraction. It started with perception.
Religion is unlikely to have started by psychologically normal people meditating and finding out that if they really think about it, the world must be magical. Religion is much more likely to have started with the psychologically unusual people who forcibly think in magical terms. What is the probability that psychologically average people made the abstract conclusion that the world is magical, when they were accompanied by people who knew that the world is magical, without even thinking?
In the present time, most religious people, even most founders of religious movements, are not unsocial, forcibly magical thinkers. As civilization grew more complex, religion evolved in a direction away from hallucination-like tales, toward greater levels of abstraction. Religious leaders who produce new delusions increasingly get replaced by religious leaders who tidy up in the old delusions. Christianity and Islam are case points. Their prophets abolished rules and deities in favor of abstract principles and general laws.
Although shamanism is, by definition, more inventive than established religions, not even all shamans can be assumed to be talented generators of new delusional content. Once the idea of the supernatural has become established, a number of different personality types are capable of making use of those ideas. Although the earlier mentioned Jungleman appeared to have very vivid and original visions of spirits, linguist Jacques Lizot reports about a Yanomamö shaman colleague with “cruel and cunning” eyes, who most of all appeared to be a social climber: Lizot describes the young shaman trainee as such:
“He is sensitive on questions of honor. In his adopted community, he is esteemed and respected for his qualities as a good hunter and courageous warrior. He is still young and has the stuff of a future leader. His undertakings are always well thought out. He is a man on his way up, a fiery and prolific orator, a worker who knows how to be generous.”40
That is, in no way a confused and otherworldly person with obviously pressing spiritual needs.
But the very idea of the supernatural needs to have emerged in a different way compared to how religion is created and maintained in an already religious world. And that was probably not through abstract thought. Without the existence of people who perceive the world in magical terms, abstraction would be the only plausible explanation. The only way people with non-magical minds could create the beliefs that pre-scientific populations all over the world hold, is to observe the world, find it unexplainable and then invent the idea that human-like minds must be present everywhere. That indeed takes quite a bit of abstraction.
Actually, it takes another type of abstraction than most of us possess. Many modern-day people are fully capable of imagining the universe “just being there”, without a human-like mind being involved in creating it. Science does little to help us with the first-mover problem. It doesn’t answer the basic question why matter and energy exists. It just accepts that it does. And we are millions, maybe billions of people who are quite fine with that. So why wouldn’t our ancestors have been? Why would they have felt the need to seek explanations, when we don’t? Their observations could tell them less than our observations can tell us. But both their and our empirical observations end somewhere. If we can live with having zero idea of what was before The Big Bang, why wouldn’t our ancestors have been fine with not knowing what was beyond their horizon? And if they weren’t, why would they have found some story about giant brothers killing each other on the back of a tortoise or some other typical myth of origin to be the most plausible explanation? Psychologically average people who think very hard seldom arrive at that kind of explanation as to why things happen. When average people try to make sense of things they use observation and logic and information obtained from other people. And most people wouldn’t logically conclude that their ancestors must have been giants or that the world must be inhabited by spirits, however long they think about it.
However, some people who are forcibly magical thinkers make up that kind of stories without even trying. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that spirits are not abstractions invented by average people. Instead, they are observations made by people with unusual faculties of observation. Cultural evolution favored people who took those observations seriously.
Only here we have the issue of belief. People with delusional disorders do not believe. They observe. Many modern-day people with delusional disorders do actually not believe in what they observe, preferring the beliefs of the majority population. That can’t make them stop observing. As one schizotypal Reddit user comments:
“I see objects as incredibly info dense. I see chairs and think about how some tiny part of it is probably capable of adding two numbers together in a meaningful way. Constantly. It’s kinda cool though and I’ve made a lot of peace with it. I just don’t let myself get too carried away.”41
That is, this person does not believe that any part of a chair can add two numbers together. And still, they can’t stop perceiving chairs as if they contained intelligent creatures.
People with this kind of a prioris observe what they observe. Some believe in what they observe, some do not believe it. But also the latter continue observing it. It was other people who had to believe what these special people communicated about their observations. Probably they were very frequently not believed, just as they are not today. Still, cultural evolution favored groups of believers.
The first believers
Delusional mental disorders can not be of late origin, because they appear in all present-day human populations. If they evolved independently, then they would have been different between populations. And for the most part they aren’t.
This explanation puts the minimum age of religion to when Homo sapiens split into branches. And the maximum age? That should have been when humans could communicate enough to transmit the worldview of delusional individuals to average individuals.
Religion arose whenever the following happened:
An ancestral human happened to be more afraid of, or more impressed by, a phenomenon than what would be useful to them on an individual level.
The said ancestral human managed to convince other humans that their perception was relevant and correct.
The group of delusional individuals gained advantages at the expense of other groups.
This process might have started at several places independently of each other. It led to the multiplication of genes for unusual patterns of sense of mind.
Let’s assume an individual is unusually obsessed with birds. I believe such individuals exist because of an anonymous poster at Reddit. They complain that they hear voices every day and the voices order them to do dangerous things. And they are obsessed with birds:
“I was fired for using work printers to print, I’m gonna conservatively guess, about ten thousand photographs of birds I found suspicious looking, to show doctors to prove I wasn’t crazy”
“I got in some legal trouble because of allegedly threatening emails and calls I made to various ornithologists and people who I felt had bird-like names or attributes. I’m banned from a few places in town because of this.”42
Imagine how surprised those ornithologists must have been! Apparently, this anonymous delusional person feels that birds are extremely significant. In prehistory, a person with this kind of perception could become the inventor of a new bird-shaped god or demon.
For a human, being obsessed with hunting game animals and not being eaten by predators is normal. Being obsessed with birds is not. The question is: When did humans start to listen carefully to some of their delusional conspecifics?
Even chimpanzees have some kind of culture.43 But the culturally specific traits that have been observed among them are mostly related to play, food acquisition or asking for attention. Chimpanzees don’t show signs of being collectively neurotic the way humans tend to be.
Either it is because they are not intellectually and linguistically advanced enough. Or they just lack the mindset. Or, most probably, a combination. In any case, exclaiming look! bird! danger! does not require great linguistic skills. In theory, a group of creatures significantly below present human intelligence could start making danger calls as soon as they saw a bird, incited by an individual with a distorted appreciation of birds.
The question is what is required for such weird behavior to actually become useful. When would delusional groups of people be better off than realistic groups of people?
I think the answer is: As soon as possible. People are always competing with each other on an evolutionary level. Males are competing over females and females are competing over protection and resources. This competition takes place both at the individual level and at the group level. Individual humans have much to gain by competing on an individual level in a way that is detrimental of the interests of the group.
In this view, everything that can increase the unity of the group and direct aggressions towards the outgroup instead of the ingroup is beneficial to the group. Even completely delusional ideas will do the trick if people believe in them enough to put aside their individual conflicts and focus on external threats. In this sense every delusion is useful as long as it unites humans.
Directing aggression from ingroup to outgroup has been a major task for humans. Delusions helped this task. Delusions muddled people’s fear and aggression toward each other. Fearing the birds more meant fearing each other less. That was not only a recipe for success in inter-group conflict. It was also a very small first step towards civilization.
A tale from the imagined past
Let’s look at an imaginary scenario from early human prehistory to see how delusions could have turned out to be useful for groups.
Imagine you are a young man in early human prehistory. Like almost all young men of all times and places, you have an issue: You are horny. And all the girls and women have already been taken. The Big Man of your group controls no less than five of them, including the one you courted.
You have other problems too. Enemies are lurking on the other side of the forest. They would like to kill both you and the Big Man and take all your young women. But that is equally much a problem for all the men in your group, so you can count on their cooperation.
In theory you could raid the opposing tribe for a woman, but that would have been a very hazardous thing to do on your own. The easiest way for you to get a woman, would be to team up with a fellow young man and challenge the Big Man for some of his wives. But the only other young unmarried man of the group isn’t very interested. Instead of plotting over how to get laid, he is obsessed with birds. He claims that the birds are from the enemies on the other sides of the forest. Although the enemies seem far away, they use the birds to spy so they can attack, he claims. He can never be at peace and he urges his group members to do something against those bird enemies.
If Birdman had been a normal young man, you would have formed a team with him against the Big Man. Together the two of you would have had a fair chance of success. In the current situation you face a tough choice: languish partnerless (a risky option when life expectancy is short) or support Birdman in his claim that the faraway enemies are not actually at a safe distance at the other side of the forest, but very nearby and very threatening.
You choose to listen to Birdman. After all, you know that watching out carefully for enemies is important. You also know to take warnings from your friends seriously. They might see things you don’t see. You conclude that Birdman might be right and decide to tell Big Man and the others about Birdman’s warnings.
Big Man shares your disposition towards listening to others. Together the men of your group decide to raid the enemies. The venture becomes a total success, because the enemies are caught unaware. From their point of view, your group was far away and no immediate threat to them. So they busied themselves with internal fighting. When you arrive, their best young warriors are injured from a recent fight over females monopolized by an older man. Your group manages to surprise the weakened warriors and kill them without any losses on your side. You kill their males and divide their fertile females between the men in your group. You choose two young women. Also Birdman, who was earlier too preoccupied with worrying to enter the fight for women, gets two women. Before the raid, he seemed like a person to whom no one needed to pay much attention. But now everyone suspects that Birdman sees important things that they don’t see themselves.
You no longer have any plans to challenge Big Man. You are too busy exploring the new hunting grounds and controlling your two new wives. Your children play with Birdman’s children. One of Birdman’s sons seems to share his father’s sense of perception. He also worries about things other people don’t worry about and receives warnings from the birds. You listen carefully to what he is saying. One thing you have learnt from life is that it is wise to listen to your friends. Even though the birds never talk to you, it is good to know someone who can hear them.
You were never anything but a normal, prosocial man. And nonetheless, through your friendship with Birdman and the success it brought you, you became the world’s first religious person.
Did this happen, and in that case, when?
I made this story up based on a number of anthropology texts on human life in primitive societies, on some information about chimpanzees and a Reddit thread started by a mentally ill person who is particularly obsessed with birds. The scientific value of this is, of course, zero.
But it is an illustration to a logical principle: That a general lack of mental clarity and even outright delusions can make people cooperate better than clear-minded people. If people can’t agree over something real, they need to agree over something imaginary. And for creatures evolved to further the interests of their own genes, agreeing over real things is difficult.
In a group of perfectly informed Machiavellians, everyone who can will fight other group members in order to gain the most advantages. Whenever outer enemies are at a safe-enough distance, people will resort to ingroup fighting. For the individual, that is the rational thing to do: Fighting at whatever front that maximizes your utility.
For the group, it is better if its members do not have a clear picture of the state of things, but constantly perceive threats from outside. It is even better if those threats are both strong and unclear at the same time. If people only overstate threats, they risk becoming recklessly aggressive toward the outgroup. If they instead perceive outside threats that are mystical and difficult to confront, they get fewer opportunities for infighting without having to take immediate action toward an enemy that will fight back.
The idea of an enemy that is both physical and spiritual gives a group important flexibility in their decision on when to take a real, physical fight. Typical small-scale societies recognizes two kinds of enemies:
Real, flesh-and-blood enemies who have to be fought with weapons
Supernatural enemies who have to be fought with magic.
A group that holds this kind of dual belief can allocate their fighting resources to whichever front they consider most rewarding at every moment. When people are feeling confident of their strength and numbers, they can choose to fight their flesh-and-blood enemies with weapons. When they are feeling less confident in their armed men, they can instead hope for their shamans to run the fight. Also then, the group members to some degree perceive themselves to be fighting. In accordance with general human psychology, people will feel less inclined to attack their fellow group members in a situation that puts the entire group under threat.
In other words, religion is a culturally induced expansion of the biological principles of war. Those principles should be very old, since we share them with a number of animals. Basically, war is just the collective fighting between conspecifics over resources and females. Chimpanzees also make that kind of war. They do show a strong preference for attacking lone, unprotected individuals. But so do people in modern small-scale human societies too. Armies are a much more recent invention than war.
That way, adaptations for war should be very ancient. When chimpanzees see an unprotected outgroup male, they can forget their rivalries and grievances and tear him into pieces. The spirit of war strengthens the group at the expense of individuals. Religion wakes up this instinct also on occasions when war is not actually imminent. It provokes individuals to cooperate as if in war without the great danger that an actual war brings. Basically, religion is a big trick to make individuals feel the kind of fear that wars and natural disasters bring, also at times of peace and plenty.
This trick has allowed groups of humans to do something that is very rare in nature: To use peace and prosperity to grow more numerous and more technologically advanced. In nature, without religion, peace and prosperity means a time for fighting group members for zero-sum resources. Religion tricked individuals into never going into the mood of peace and prosperity. It made them remain in a state of heightened threat, also when times were objectively good.
Naturally, counter-adaptations to this barrier to internal fighting also evolved. History has been a constant tug-of-war between personalities. On the one side were clear-sighted individuals who correctly estimated that attacking group-members was their best chance of success. On the other side were confused individuals who believed in threats and opportunities that, scientifically speaking, were not there.
In the long run, the latter won a majority of the human race. The success of the groups of confused individuals was so big that it outweighed the disadvantages confused individuals suffered on the individual level. Even if the most selfish Machiavellian had twice as many surviving children as the average group member, groups consisting of a majority of more timid, more confused people did so much better than groups with a majority of Machiavellians that the confused people came to constitute a majority of humans.
The need to focus on things that are, in a scientific sense, plain false can appear to be a high price to pay for group unity. But the difficulties for a great ape to build civilization are hard to overestimate. The evolution of religion was a high price to pay for even higher gains.
To assess the similarity, I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to give me measurements so I could make a dress for a Homo erectus female in the upper size ranges. Both AIs gave me measurements ranges that I could use to make a dress for myself. And I always passed as normal enough for modern human society. I compared the AI generated measurements for a Homo erectus male to my husband, who is tall and slender. He could have shared a suit with an adult Homo erectus man, except that the Homo erectus man had a bigger chest and was a little shorter.
Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, 2019
But not to the islands of Luzon and Flores. Both Homo luzonensis and Homo floresiensis used older technology, the so-called Oldowan technology that was used in Africa two million years ago.
“In contrast to the life history data, the associated Acheulian industries are often described as more or less stagnant over a million years and thousands of kilo-meters and across a number of varied environmental settings—a “long oscillation” (Isaac 1976) with no progressive trend (Leakey 1975). Although many older schemes attempted to document a gradual development in handaxe shape and sophistication through time (Breuil and Koslowski 1931, 1932, 1934; Commont 1908; Gilead 1970), most modern workers are skeptical of such evolutionary schema, see little directional or ordered change, and take greater account of a range of complicating factors. One cannot simply assume that cruder equals older or that forms appeared and disappeared in a regular sequence. The local and regional differences that do exist are often attributed to mechanical factors such as raw material shape, type, and availability (e.g., Jones 1979, 1981; White 1998); resharpening (Jones 1994; McPherron 1994); or function (Roe 1981). In sum, the Middle Pleistocene archaeological record seems to be characterized by a technological conservatism of unparalleled magnitude, a million years of stasis usually attributed to the limited cognitive and linguistic abilities of the hominins involved (Binford 1989; Isaac 1972; Klein 1999; Mithen 1996).”
Quotation from Growing Up in the Middle Pleistocene - Life History Strategies and Their Relationship to Acheulian Industries, by April Nowell and Mark White, in Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition, 2010, page 70, 33 percent of e-book
Adam P. Van Arsdale, Homo erectus - A Bigger, Smarter, Faster Hominin Lineage by , 2013, Nature Education, https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/homo-erectus-a-bigger-smarter-97879043/.
See also Britannica on Increasing brain size in human evolution in Tools, hands, and heads in the Pliocene and Pleistocene by Russell Howard Tuttle
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution/Increasing-brain-size
James Ashworth, Modern humans, Homo sapiens: When, where and how did we evolve? https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/modern-humans-homo-sapiens-when-where-how-did-we-evolve.html
Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda, Frank W. Marlowe, Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion, 2016, https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1007/s12110-016-9260-0.pdf
I read this argument in a Swedish book on language, Språken före historien by Tore Jansson, 2019.
Johan J. Bolhuis, Ian Tattersall, Noam Chomsky, Robert C. Berwick, How Could Language Have Evolved? https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda, Frank W. Marlowe, Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion, 2016, https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/religion
Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda, Frank W. Marlowe, Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion, 2016, https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/religion
unless point 1 is true
https://www.verywellmind.com/schizotypal-personality-disorder-4689994
A person who experiences controlled, non-pathological hallucinations gave me the following definition of what is a hallucination: ”Basically, everything is a hallucination, but some hallucinations rely more on prior information and more on sensory input. If you don’t use sensory input and hallucinate almost only from a priory distributions in your brain, we call that “a hallucination”, but everything is a hallucination to some extent.”
Suprakash Chaudhury, Hallucinations: Clinical aspects and management, 2010, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3105559/
Sebastian Ocklenburg, Hallucinations Are Far More Common Than Most People Think, 2022https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202212/new-research-shows-how-common-hallucinations-really-are
Zachariah Francois; Tyler J. Torrico, Schizotypal Personality Disorder, 2024, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603720/
For a summary see for example Ari Brouwer, Michael James Winkelman, Charles L. Raison, Shamanism: psychopathology and psychotherapy, 2023, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2023.2258212 and The Shaman and Schizophrenia, Revisited by Tanya Marie Luhrmann, John Dulin, Vivian Dzokoto, 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11362382/
Most notably Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective by Jane Murphy, 1976
Ettore Biocca, Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1965, 1996, page 294
Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman’s Story, 1996, 2018
This kind of belief seems surprisingly independent of culture. Westerners with schizophrenia also report a conviction that they kill people over distances with their thoughts only, although the Western schizophrenics tend to be horrified with their imagined killings while Jungleman was very satisfied with his. For example Kenny Steele in The Day the Voices Stopped by Kenny Steele and Claire Berman, 2002 and Elyn Saks in Diary of a High-Functioning Person with Schizophrenia, by Elyn Saks and Gareth Cook, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diary-of-a-high-function/
This process is extensively described in Ari Brouwer, Michael James Winkelman, Charles L. Raison, Shamanism: psychopathology and psychotherapy, 2023 and The Shaman and Schizophrenia, Revisited by Tanya Marie Luhrmann, John Dulin, Vivian Dzokoto, 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11362382/
Sue E. Estroff, Subject/Subjectivities in Dispute: The Poetics, Politics, and Performance of First-Person Narratives of People with Schizophrenia, in Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience, 2003
see for example Voices That Are More Benign
The Experience of Auditory Hallucinations in Chennai by T.M. Luhrmann and R. Padmavati in Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, edited by Tanya Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow, 2016
https://www.hearingvoicesusa.org/
Diary of a High-Functioning Person with Schizophrenia, by Elyn Saks and Gareth Cook, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diary-of-a-high-function/
Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman’s Story, 1996, 2018
Susser E, Neugebauer R, Hoek HW, Brown AS, Lin S, Labovitz D, et al. Schizophrenia after prenatal famine: Further evidence, 1996 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8540774/
Huttunen MO, Niskanen P,. Prenatal loss of father and psychiatric disorders, 1978. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/727894/
Rebecca Pinto, Mark Ashworth, Roger Jones, Schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK: an exploration of underlying causes of the high incidence rate, 2008, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2418996/
Rebecca Pinto, Mark Ashworth, Roger Jones, Schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK: an exploration of underlying causes of the high incidence rate, 2008
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2418996/
Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 2006, 13 percent of e-book.
Wikipedia on Nongqawuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse.
Wikipedia on King Sarili, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarili_kaHintsa
Ian Kelleher, Dearbhla Connor. Mary Clark, Nina Devlin, Prevalence of psychotic symptoms in childhood and adolescence: A systematic review and meta-analysis of population-based studies, 2012, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221729660_Prevalence_of_psychotic_symptoms_in_childhood_and_adolescence_A_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis_of_population-based_studies
Jusleen Kendhari, Ravi Shankar, Laine Young-Walker, A Review of Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia, 2016, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6526799/
Reddit posted 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizotypal/comments/1im03pw/wanna_be_normal_but_dont/
Jaques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest, 1985
Reddit posted 31 January 2026 https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizotypal/comments/1qrm06o/do_any_of_you_hear_voices_daily/
Whiten*, J. Goodall, W. C. McGrew, T. Nishida, V. Reynoldsk, Y. Sugiyama, C. E. G. Tutin, R. W. Wrangham, C. Boesch, Cultures in chimpanzees, 1999 https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1038/21415.pdf
"Science does little to help us with the first-mover problem. It doesn’t answer the basic question why matter and energy exists. It just accepts that it does. And we are millions, maybe billions of people who are quite fine with that."
Is this an accurate description of the contemporary world population? How many people are really "quite fine with that" and where are they? I assume you might point to people in elite institutions in the West like Harvard, the New York Times, the European Parliament or Silicon Valley, but when I read what people in these places are up to, I don't get the sense that they are "fine with" a world without a narrative. Whether it is social justice, environmentalism or trans-humanism, it seems like even the most erstwhile "scientifically-oriented" people are animated by a drive to worship unseen phenomena and "immanentize the eschaton" so-to-speak.
Didn't it occur to you that maybe you have blunted senses and that an entire aspect of human experience is escaping you, that you are, basically, color-blind?
Or just trained to be?