WI: A more equal distribution between religious and Atheist.

In OTL, through out most of our history the population of the world is only 2.3% percent Atheist, or 11.9% Non Religous. What if thoughout human history, there was exactly 50% of the population that was genetically predisposed to being religious, and another 50% of the population that was genetically predisposed to being atheist. How would this effect the evolution of humanity?
 
Unless i'm wrong, I don't think you can be genetically predisposed to being religious or not. Besides you can be an atheist and still have a religion, Atheism is not believing in a god, and gods and religion aren't mutually exclusive. Your best bet for this would to try to promote or create Atheistic religions like Buddhism which save a branch or two have no gods or don't have them as the centerpiece of the religion.

Other than that your gonna have to try to butterfly spiritualism or reduce the impact if that's even possible in a before 1900 POD.
 
Unless i'm wrong, I don't think you can be genetically predisposed to being religious or not. Besides you can be an atheist and still have a religion, Atheism is not believing in a god, and gods and religion aren't mutually exclusive. Your best bet for this would to try to promote or create Atheistic religions like Buddhism which save a branch or two have no gods or don't have them as the centerpiece of the religion.

Other than that your gonna have to try to butterfly spiritualism or reduce the impact if that's even possible in a before 1900 POD.
By Atheist, i mean fundimentally incapable of having a religion.
 
Having an equal split could cause wars and civil wars all over the place.

Maybe there would be cities and countries where you must be a certain religion or be an atheist.

If you managed to get a population into an exact 50/50 split, unless one of the parties in that split advocated a higher or lower birthrate, it would be fairly easy to keep it that way.

Some people would convert to a religion because of supposed intervention from the said religion's god, and others would renounce their religion because of a realisation that their god is fake.
 
By Atheist, i mean fundimentally incapable of having a religion.

I don't know if that kind of aspect of human psychology is hardwired into the brain. It seems more like something that falls on the nurture side of the nature/nurture divide.

I mean, with the right stimuli and external circumstances, you can indoctrinate people into believing the strangest things.
 

Rex Mundi

Banned
Unless i'm wrong, I don't think you can be genetically predisposed to being religious or not. Besides you can be an atheist and still have a religion, Atheism is not believing in a god, and gods and religion aren't mutually exclusive. Your best bet for this would to try to promote or create Atheistic religions like Buddhism which save a branch or two have no gods or don't have them as the centerpiece of the religion.

Other than that your gonna have to try to butterfly spiritualism or reduce the impact if that's even possible in a before 1900 POD.

You are wrong. You can be genetically predisposed to be anything.
 
You are wrong. You can be genetically predisposed to be anything.

How would we know? It's not like we have a full picture even of what the genome encodes, certainly nowhere near that for the interactions with the body's chemical subsystems.

As regards the question: it's naive to assume that the current divide between religious and nonreligious reflects genetic predisposition in any way accurately. Religiosity is as much a social as an individual phenomenon. I have heard it posited that central Europeans are somehow genetically less religious, but that idea struggles to explain things like the 30 years' war or 18th-century pietism.

A society with 50% disposed towards religion and 50% not, assuming similar historical trajectories, is liable to end up 100% religious because it is a much more pressing concern for the religious to impose their beliefs on the nonreligious than it is for the nonreligious to refuse to pay lip service to some Grand Boojum or other. Given enough time, we end up with a world where even the nonreligious believe that saying grace and going to church on Sunday is as normatively part of the right life as using the knife with your right hand. You don't need any religious predisposition to internalise social norms.
 
By Atheist, i mean fundimentally incapable of having a religion.

Nobody is that (unless yopu mean people incapabnle of developing and communicating decisions of any kind). It is quite possible that there are peopüle more or less predisposed to holding on to certain life-determining beliefs, but that's not having a religion. In the Christian tradition, it's called "faith" these days. Even someone of very little faith is fully capable of being religious. No actual convictions are required for that. Even to be rteligious without being hypocritical, all you need is a basic kit of human emotions.
 
This whole predisposition thing is ASB. The Idea of a larger number of Atheist societies from an earlier era is more possible, but I'm not sure that the impact would be that great. Having no religion does not by definition make someone more rational, nor the inverse make them more zealous. Societies would likely grow up similarly to OTL, with the atheists and religious being more suspicious and antagonistic to eachother in some places, and able to mutually coexist in others, just like peoples of different religions OTL. If you really fish hard (and accept some modern atheist steriotypes) you might be able to envision a society with more humanist based knowledge and values earlier, but then, atheist regimes in OTL haven't been specifically more humanist than religious ones, so I'm not convinced that would work.

So, in the broad sense, not much changes, but case by case things can change allot, as much due to the butterfly effect as to the change in religion.
 
How would we know? It's not like we have a full picture even of what the genome encodes, certainly nowhere near that for the interactions with the body's chemical subsystems.

As regards the question: it's naive to assume that the current divide between religious and nonreligious reflects genetic predisposition in any way accurately. Religiosity is as much a social as an individual phenomenon. I have heard it posited that central Europeans are somehow genetically less religious, but that idea struggles to explain things like the 30 years' war or 18th-century pietism.

A society with 50% disposed towards religion and 50% not, assuming similar historical trajectories, is liable to end up 100% religious because it is a much more pressing concern for the religious to impose their beliefs on the nonreligious than it is for the nonreligious to refuse to pay lip service to some Grand Boojum or other. Given enough time, we end up with a world where even the nonreligious believe that saying grace and going to church on Sunday is as normatively part of the right life as using the knife with your right hand. You don't need any religious predisposition to internalise social norms.

Interestingly, I was catching up with a podcast of "The Infinite Monkey Cage" on the way to work this morning, and there was a reference to research indicating that the tendency for belief (rather than religion per se) may be around 40% genetic. Also, the position that women are more likely to be believers than men was raised.

There was an interesting discussion following on from talking about the 'Princess Alice' experiment, which drew the conclusion that religion/higher power is an almost inevitable result of human social interactions and acts as a tool to enforce social norms and behaviours.

If all this is correct, then it would suggest that a more equal split would require a difference in the social nature of humans, and that is a massive butterfly that might prevent the development of society beyond the simple family/tribe.
 
Interestingly, I was catching up with a podcast of "The Infinite Monkey Cage" on the way to work this morning, and there was a reference to research indicating that the tendency for belief (rather than religion per se) may be around 40% genetic. Also, the position that women are more likely to be believers than men was raised.

There was an interesting discussion following on from talking about the 'Princess Alice' experiment, which drew the conclusion that religion/higher power is an almost inevitable result of human social interactions and acts as a tool to enforce social norms and behaviours.

If all this is correct, then it would suggest that a more equal split would require a difference in the social nature of humans, and that is a massive butterfly that might prevent the development of society beyond the simple family/tribe.

I agree. Also, even if there is absolutely no genetic predisposition to spirituality in humans, it is an obvious and almost universal characteristic of early human culture, exhibiting evidence in the archaeological record as long as H. Sapiens sapiens has existed. To have 50% of humanity completely lack a belief in a spiritual world would require a PoD several million years ago and result in early humans that completely lacked a sense of wonder and imagination. Clever social creatures perhaps, but not recognizeably human in a social and cultural sense. Also, people incapable of imagining or believing in things that can't be seen are much less likely to be at the forefront of cultural and technological innovation. The 50% of people lacking this ability would soon be marginalized technologically, socially, and culturally, and have no role in subsequent human cultural evolution.
 
Last edited:

Rex Mundi

Banned
I agree. Also, even if there is absolutely no genetic predisposition to spirituality in humans, it is an obvious and almost universal characteristic of early human culture, exhibiting evidence in the archaeological record as long as H. Sapiens sapiens has existed. To have 50% of humanity completely lack a belief in a spiritual world would require a PoD several million years ago and result in early humans that completely lacked a sense of wonder and imagination. Clever social creatures perhaps, but not recognizeably human in a social and cultural sense. Also, people incapable of imagining or believing in things that can't be seen are much less likely to be at the forefront of cultural and technological innovation. The 50% of people lacking this ability would soon be marginalized technologically, socially, and culturally, and have no role in subsequent human cultural evolution.

Spirituality isn't the same thing as "imagining or believing in things that can't be seen", though. There are people who write sci fi or fantasy stories that don't believe in spirits. And people who believe in gravity who don't believe in spirits.
 
I don't really understand the premise here. Are we saying that humanity by its very nature is less inclined to believe in god(s) (i.e. a POD long ago in our evolutionary ancestry), or simply that non-theistic philosophies do better than in OTL?

Also, how are we categorising philosophies like Buddhism and Confucianism? What about the ancient Greek philosophers, who mostly believed in the existence of gods, but did not look to them for moral guidance? I don't think the extraordinary successes of strongly theistic religions like Christianity, Islam and Hinduism over their less God-fearing rivals was an inevitable result of our DNA.
 
Spirituality isn't the same thing as "imagining or believing in things that can't be seen", though. There are people who write sci fi or fantasy stories that don't believe in spirits. And people who believe in gravity who don't believe in spirits.

They both stem from fertile imagination. The imagination that dreams up novels and posits the existience of scientific laws to explain the world around us the same imagination that creates gods, demons, ghosts, heaven, nirvana, etc. Since we are talking about a very early PoD (before science, literature, etc) belief in a spiritual plane would be the earliest manifestation of human imagination. If fully 50% of humans lacked this imagination, those people would soon become segregated into very different species, or become extinct. They would have no art, no literature, no coherent science, probably much more rudementary language...just a bunch of upright primates using their big brains to react to immediate needs and/or anticipate known experiences. Basically really smart upright apes still using stone tools, probably.
 
If you are asking for a world where 50% believe in God and the other 50% are atheists that belongs to ASB. It is like asking why a situation where 50% are gay and the other 50% are heterosexual do not exist. Belief in God is developed in a person based on his parentage and upbringing. Majority of the people are believers and hence the pieces of information about God and religion are imparted from the childhood itself. 99% of the people adopt the religion and the belief system of their parents. Only a minority rebel against it and become atheists or convert into another religion. An important reason is that the majority do not bother about the religion and just follow the "normal" life.

If you ask how did the religion and the belief in God develop in the first place, it calls for a long answer. In short it was the fear of nature and its terrors that helped the sowing of the seeds of 'religion' in the stone age savage. The first gods were the natural phenomena like fire, wind, rain, etc. The people started worshiping the personified forces of nature as gods. This polytheism later developed into monotheism and belief in one supreme God. Thus theism became an important basis of the society everywhere. Atheism developed only as a reaction to it and hence it is a minority opinion everywhere.
 
Last edited:
Top