The Scientific Case for Divine Inspiration

The rise of civilization depended on freak ideas that seldom occur in nature.

One of the most important differences between traditional religions and secular society is their view of human nature. Modern book-based religions claim that their version of culture is divinely inspired. One way or another, God sent messages to humans about how to conduct their lives. Humans need to constantly observe this divine inspiration. Otherwise they will fall down into their base nature. Also non-monotheist Eastern religions draw a sharp limit between nature and enlightened states.

In Modern Western secular society, on the other hand, there are important currents that say the opposite of this: Human nature is in itself enlightened. If humans act in non-enlightened ways, it is because they have been corrupted by bad culture. If humans are just allowed to exercise their nature, they will act in an ideally civilized way. This ideological vein gave rise to ideas about The Noble Savage, in spite of ample anthropological proof of ignoble behavior in primitive societies.

The origins of culture

I believe that from a scientific point of view, the traditional religions are more right than the current secular world view. I don't mean that it would be scientific to say that literally, God handed down cultured principles to people at some point of history. God has no place in science. But I do mean that culture arose from very unusual and improbable events. Traditionally religious people would call those events divine revelations. I call them freak events.

When I grew up I was taught that human development from the ape stage to the stone age to modern society was all about technology. Sometimes through unusual ingenuity, sometimes by accident, human technology evolved until we reached today's society. The necessary steps to take were always described as technological. On a naive level it looks self-evident: Humans use advanced manufactured tools, animals do not, so the more humans got the idea to make more advanced tools, the more they diverged from the other animals.

But advanced technology is not the only thing that makes humans different from other animals. Also large groups of cooperating males make humans different. In nature, male cooperation is unusual. Herd animals are commonly only herd animals on the female side. It might look like technology is the killer app of humans compared to the other animals. But numerous genetically unrelated males living together and comparatively peacefully dividing females between them might be equally against nature.

Throughout the animal kingdom, males have evolved to be reproductively greedy. And that effectively hinders male-male cooperation. Overcoming this specific part of nature was as important as inventing technology. In fact, the latter was much of an effect of the former. Advanced technology needs an extensive society of civilians to be developed and maintained. As long as every man is a warrior, there is little space for nerds.

All in all, I have increasingly come to believe that the most important challenge humans had to overcome was not of technological nature, but social nature: In order to form large-scale societies, people had to overcome their natural reproductive greed enough to avoid fighting each other over reproductive opportunities. I launched the concept in the posts Violent Enough to Stand Still and Why do Humans Ever Develop, and I have elaborated it a bit in a few other posts like this one.

Under primitive conditions, wars between groups of humans tend to keep the population down. This creates a rather high standard of living with regard to natural resources: Life is dangerous, but there mostly is enough to eat. In such a sparsely populated environment, males have excellent reasons to appropriate as many females as they can. Since women can provide most calories through gathering or horticulture, they become very desirable. And that makes keeping women, and even raising girls, hazardous because they are so much in demand.

In such environments, males will always disagree over who should control the fertile women. Close relatives can be somewhat generous toward each other, but that's it. Evolution selects for reproductively greedy males who are prepared to fight other men in order to acquire females from them. It all leads to a vicious circle: population is so sparse that women can provide for themselves and their children with only limited help from men. That makes women extremely attractive to men: They are both sexual objects, childbearers and laborers. Most men want as many as possible of them. That situation creates conflicts between men, who thereby kill each other at high rates. The high murder rate keeps population pressure down, which makes land abundant enough to allow women to keep on providing most calories for themselves, their children and their husbands. That way, women continue being extremely attractive and men are prepared to fight to obtain as many as possible.

That way things can go on century after century. Or, more specifically, things are likely to have been that way for hundreds of thousands of years and maybe millions of years. It is no wonder, because fighting over females is what the males of most mammals do. Chimpanzees and humans are special, since males of these species also form coalitions against other groups of males. Humans form bigger and more complex coalitions than chimpanzees. But also human nature has its limits. “Large-scale society” and “civilization” are basically synonyms, because human nature alone doesn't allow more than a limited number of men to live and let live at close quarters. Chimpanzee nature allows some tens of individuals to form groups. Human nature allows some hundreds of individuals to form groups. We know that empirically: Across central Africa, there are many small groups of chimpanzees. All over the world, there have been many slightly bigger groups of humans with primitive social organizations. For that reason, we can guess that chimpanzee nature and human nature allows individuals to form coalitions of a certain size easily under different circumstances. And then nature reaches its limits and hostility takes over.

Why does civilization arise?

Why did civilization arise in several places, independently of each other? There seems to be no clear answer to that question. Population density, which in its turn depends on climate and technology, obviously plays a role. All cradles of civilization are located in comparatively warm climates on fertile grounds. Quite obviously, for civilization to arise, there needs to be a certain relationship between food production and communications.

So the opportunity to settle densely (like in Sumer), or to travel very efficiently between settlements (like in ancient Egypt), is a prerequisite for civilization to arise. But only a prerequisite. In the very majority of times and places where people could live densely, civilization did not arise.

The most notable of those is Papua New Guinea. When Europeans arrived in the 1930s, people lived fairly densely locked into a plateau that was more or less inaccessible from the coast. For example the Dugum Dani exercised ritual warfare against their neighbors, who only lived within a short walking distance.¹

The men kept constant watch for raids, sitting in watchtowers. Land was scarce, because the women who worked the land were under constant threat of being killed or kidnapped. A woman who walked thoughtlessly into her fields and was killed was considered to have committed suicide; the equivalent of walking straight onto a highway in modern society.² People ate very little protein, because they could only get meat from their domesticated pigs: the dense settlements filled with enemies prevented any significant hunting. Parts of fingers of girls and women were sacrificed every time a relative died, making women's hands look like an uneven collection of stumps. Since women were the main agricultural workers this hampered their efficiency. But since the Dani were constrained by their neighbors on all sides, efficiency probably wasn't crucial, because safe-enough land was limited anyway. To cope with their cramped conditions, the Dani women exercised strict family planning. Few women had more than two children totally. This was said by the Dani themselves to be achieved through very extensive sexual abstinence and abortion.³ However they did it, in combination with their high death rate they somehow avoided expanding.

The Dani, and many other groups like them, lived in a state of stalemate, generation after generation. They grew their gardens and fought their petty wars, which achieved a high enough death rate to keep the population fairly stable. This went on and on, without one single group on the entire island of Papua conquering their neighbors and creating a bigger political unit.

Conversely, it seems like civilizations can arise also with low levels of technology. The Caral-Supe site in present-day Peru is dated to 3500 BCE, that is, 5500 years ago. Residents built tall pyramids and had a comparatively very advanced textile industry. But they seem to have lacked pottery. They ate their food, which consisted of grown vegetables and fish, roasted over fire. Very little visual art has been found at the excavation sites, but knotted rope bundles of the same kind as in the later Inca empire have been found.

In summary, although it appears like civilization can only arise under certain circumstances, that range of circumstances is really broad. And there are no known circumstances under which civilization must arise.

An idea about ideas

About 70 000 years ago, modern humans spread across the globe, something like this:

Map from Wikimedia Commons

And then, in just a few spots, civilization appeared. Otherwise it didn't.

Map from Reddit

Why did civilizations occur on these spots and not the others? I think that the missing component is ideas. The reason why people built civilizations in a few places, is that they got ideas that allowed them to do that.

Fundamentally, ideas are phenomena of nature. And as with most phenomena of nature, different kinds of ideas should appear in roughly bell-shaped curves.

For example, ideas about how selfish people should be should appear in a rough bell-shaped, with the bulk of the ideas being moderately selfish. If people have evolved for millions of years to be selfish but also generous to kin and capable of reciprocity, most ideas will appear in that range. There will also be a rather fat tail to the left made up by people who have evolved to selfishly exploit the cooperative nature of others (I wrote about that in The game: How delusions can make people excellent players).

But there should also be a thin right tail. And that tail should consist of ideas that lead to behavior that is less selfish than the commonly occurring ideas.

Those outlier ideas do not need to be pleasant. It can be a scary idea that the sun has made a threat against the human race and craves blood. It can be an extremely selfish leader who gets the idea that he possesses divine powers and that other men thereby need to be unusually altruistic. An outlier idea that makes people cooperate does in no way need to be made of altruism in itself. It is enough that it makes people act more altruistically than they would under most ideas.

Over many thousands of years, humans evolved to move very rare and potentially useful ideas into the mainstream this way: Cultural evolution made us evolve into cultural beings. The readiness with which most people accept culture points to very old origins of this line of evolution. Much older than civilization. And this further emphasizes the importance of very rare outlier ideas for civilization to form: Humans most probably were cultural beings for hundreds of thousands or millions of years before something like a civilization arose. It is also possible that unusually altruistic ideas are not enough in themselves. Maybe an unusual psychological composition of the group on which they occur is also necessary for an unusually such an idea to take root. However, one thing is clear: Very unusual circumstances are needed for an outlier idea to be accepted by enough people in a suitable environment. Otherwise, civilization would have occurred earlier and in more places. The rise of civilization at only a few spots and then slowly spreading from there points to a dependence on very rare occurrences.

In support of religion

And this is what makes religious people right. Because also if they are wrong when they say that the exceptional event consisted in God speaking directly to a human being, they are right to acknowledge that their cultures are founded on exceptional events. Religious people tend to believe that it is their duty to safeguard an inherited complex of ideas. Furthermore, they tend to believe that those ideas, or other similar ideas, are a necessary prerequisite to be morally good.

During the last few centuries, secular culture has tried to prove religious culture wrong on these points. Not only on the point that God spoke directly to a few humans (which is very difficult to prove, or disprove, scientifically), but also their general appreciation of inherited culture. The idea that God does not exist has been accompanied by the idea that God is not necessary. Instead, human nature has increasingly been described as so morally pure and benevolent that culture is a moral burden rather than a moral asset.

Thinking about it, the idea that human nature is morally good is fundamentally absurd, because everybody knows that nature is not morally good, but neutral. Why would human nature be such a glaring exception from other parts of nature? It makes no sense. Still, this has become a common modern narrative: That humans are so morally good by nature that culture can't make them any better. From this follows that inherited culture is useless or worse than useless.

From this notion stems the idea that it is impolite to call any human population uncivilized. Enlightened anthropologists are supposed to show their consciousness of this norm through renaming primitive societies technologically primitive societies or small-scale societies or simple societies. The idea that some societies are more civilized than others is impolite, because according to the modern secular world view, civilization is within us.⁴

The only problem is that it is wrong. The way civilization arose indicates that civilization is actually not within us. Rather, civilization is a very small part of us, amplified through cultural learning. Without that cultural learning, the outlier part of us that is fit to form civilizations will drown under our nature, until something very improbable finally happens again.

Gravity and grace

The manner in which civilization occurred and spread points in another direction. It points to rare chance events. In nature, such outliers just tend to form some noise. But among humans, outliers of nature laid the foundation for cultural evolution. Human societies that happened to host outlier ideas and that preserved and developed those ideas over generations became the winners of cultural evolution.

This is the essential difference between nature and culture. Culture picks up extremes from nature and puts them in the mainstream. When that happens, people can appreciate the effects, which makes most of them prefer life under human culture to life under human nature. That way, fringe ideas from thousands of years ago are still being preserved. In nature, such outliers would have been irrelevant. But cultural evolution, and human reason, have made us elevate some of them.

This distinction between nature and culture was most clearly expressed by philosopher Simone Weil, who died in 1943 from tuberculosis and self-starvation at the age of 34. Weil made a very sharp distinction between the gravity and force of the natural world and the grace of the divine world. God is what contradicts the brutal and selfish laws of nature, she explained.

These lines of thinking made the Jewish-born, secular-raised Simone Weil embrace Catholicism. But I don't think that outright religiousness is the only logical conclusion of her ideas. The central point is that some parts of human culture are such outliers in nature that they form an opposite force to nature. Whether they are of divine origin or not, that is factually the case. Human existence is a tug-of-war between our genetically inherited nature and those outlier ideas that have been treasured for many generations. I think we all sense the struggle between our natures and those venerated ideas through our entire lives.

Did culture make us cultured?

If our genes have evolved for many generations under the influence of a set of outlier ideas, shouldn't those genes finally adapt to those outlier ideas?

Yes. But not necessarily in a good way. Evolution works in two directions: In particular on the group level, it selects for people who follow a useful outlier idea with comparative ease. On the individual level and kin level, it selects for people who are capable of finding loopholes in such social arrangements and act selfishly in spite of them.

Civilization is still young. Sometimes I imagine humans tens of thousands of years into the future, who will have evolved much longer under civilizations. Through the twists and turns of history, they might have evolved to something else than we are. For example, technology development might select for the conscientious and peaceful personalities of excellent engineers, who will form the majority of some populations, instead of small minorities as today. Maybe they will read about our time from their space stations, marveling about how rough our personalities were.

But in any case, it is very unlikely that humans will ever evolve to fully come to terms with their natures. Once we have discovered that it is possible to adopt freak ideas into the mainstream, cultural evolution will promote the groups that are doing so. Once the ball of cultural evolution has been set in motion, we will never come to terms with ourselves.

1. An interesting film clip of such an instance of warfare from 1964 can be watched here on YouTube.

2. Karl Heider, Robert Gardner, Gardens of War – Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age, 1968, page 92

3. Karl Heider, The Dugum Dani - A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea, 1970, page 71-75

4. The most extreme expression of this view is summarized in the Effective Altruism movement. The core teaching of Effective Altruism is that the only thing that matters is increasing wellbeing and decreasing suffering. Effective Altruists differ over how they value wellbeing and suffering across species, but they agree over one thing: That all humans are equal and the humans whose problems are the cheapest to fix should thereby be prioritized. Every kind of charity that instead aims at upholding a certain culture is dismissed as ineffective.

Thereby, effective Altruism forms a kind of extreme conclusion of the potential and limits of secular Western society: Technologically brilliant, highly conscientious and culturally stupid. Through denying the importance of culture, Western society in general and Rationalism in particular has reached the limits of its forces. And that is because they build on an assumption that isn't true: That human nature is civilized, and that all varieties of human culture are thereby equal.