Small societies developed the ‘moralising God’ concept to help them grow, claim academics
Small societies developed the idea of a “moralising God” to help them grow, academics have suggested, reversing the theory of a so-called God threshold.
The revelation comes following a fresh analysis of the original data which formed the basis of a controversial study published in 2019, which suggested that human societies hit a God threshold at around one million people where they need a moralising, rule-making deity to keep order.
The study, published in the journal Nature, and conducted by Oxford University and Keio University in Japan, found that only "megasocieties" of more than one million people required the kind of unyielding cohesive beliefs that gave rise to major religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism.
The authors analysed 414 societies, spanning the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, measuring social complexity and the supernatural enforcement of morality.
However, following a re-analysis of the data, academics have suggested that the 2019 paper was a misinterpretation of missing data, due to a lack of written evidence. As a result, the debate as to whether societies grew alongside the concept of a moralising God has, they argue, has been reopened.
The new research, also published in Nature, which analysed the first recordings of moralising Gods between 4000 BCE and 2000 CE, was led by Dr Bret Beheim, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, and co-authored by Dr Michael Muthukrishna and Dr Rachel Spicer, from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The researchers skewed the original data by 100 years – the smallest measurement of time used in the 2019 research – and found that the results massively shifted to show that moralising gods were also present in much smaller societies. This means that while the new research is hypothetical, the original analysis was clearly “not robust” as the conclusion should not be changing drastically over such a large period of time.
As a result, Dr Muthukrishna said it was arguable that the "big God hypothesis" and “concept of supernatural punishments coevolving” was potentially more likely than the theory that civilisation came first, followed by God, and God became increasingly important as a byproduct of an expanding society.
“The relationship between moralising religious beliefs and the size and complexity of societies is hotly debated in cultural evolution,” he said. “This re-analysis re-opens the debate: the belief in big, moralising supernatural punishers—from karma to Yahweh and Allah—may have co-evolved with large civilizations.”
The new research also highlights that in this treatment of the data, populations such as Hawaii, with a well-documented archaeological history, would only have been recorded as having religious beliefs with the arrival of the Europeans who were there to document it.
As such, the original researchers’ assumption produced a powerful forward bias, pushing the estimation of the adoption of religious beliefs to a much later date in history.
Dr Spicer added: “How data is handled before it's analysed can completely change the results. In this case, we showed that small changes to how missing data was handled led to the opposite conclusion.”
“We hope this work highlights the importance of data handling decisions for future research."
