Introduction: Humanity´s Oldest Instinct
Every civilisation that ever existed created some kind of god. This is one of the most revealing facts about our species. It is not a universal proof of the divine. It is a universal proof of the human need for the divine. When early humans looked at a violent, uncertain world, they had questions that could not wait for science. They saw storms, illness, death, famine and the terrifying indifference of nature. In that silence, humans invented voices. In the dark, they invented eyes watching them. In the chaos, they invented order.
Religion did not begin as a doctrine. It began as an instinct. We reached for gods for the same reason we reached for tools. Survival. Explanation. Comfort. Control.
This article explores why humans search for gods at all. It is not about a single religion. It is about the machinery inside human minds and societies that makes supernatural belief feel natural. It is also about why those beliefs persist even when the explanations they once provided have been replaced by science, philosophy and a better understanding of ourselves.
Also see our article entitled meaning without a master.
PART ONE: THE BELIEF MAKING BRAIN
1. A Brain Built for Patterns
Humans see patterns even when they do not exist. Our ancestors had to make rapid decisions about threats. If a rustle in the bushes was a predator, reacting quickly saved your life. If it was only the wind, the cost was small. Natural selection favoured those who assumed agency behind events. This created a brain that expects intention everywhere.
This is why humans naturally imagine gods, spirits and unseen forces. When lightning strikes or an illness spreads, it feels as if something or someone must have caused it. The mind leaps from event to agency long before it leaps to evidence.
David Hume wrote, “The human mind is a great fabricator of ideas, and when it has once embraced a notion, it draws all things else to support and confirm it.” Religion thrives on this fabric.
Pattern detection was a survival mechanism, but it also laid the foundation for belief. Early humans saw faces in the sky, messages in the stars and meaning in chance. The leap to gods was not a theological leap. It was a neurological reflex.
2. The Fear Engine: Death as the Architect of Religion
Death is the first problem that no human can solve. We are the only species aware of our own mortality, and this awareness creates a psychological wound that never closes. The terror of extinction, of disappearing forever, is powerful enough to make any comforting story attractive.
Ancient people buried their dead with tools and ornaments. This suggests they believed the dead would need them somewhere else. They did not invent this belief because it was true. They invented it because the alternative was unbearable.
The philosopher Lucretius argued that humans cling to religion because “fear was the first thing on earth to create gods.” Fear of storms, fear of famine, fear of the unknown, fear of death. Religion rose to replace fear with narrative.
Religion promises that life goes on. That death is not the end. That loved ones continue in some eternal place. Even today, the idea of eternal life has enormous emotional gravity. It pulls people toward belief regardless of evidence.
3. Certainty as a Comfort Drug
Humans dislike uncertainty. We want answers, even incorrect ones. Uncertainty feels like danger. Certainty feels like safety. Religion offers complete answers to every question that matters. Origin, purpose, identity, morality, destiny. This is not an accident. It is a design.
Science offers provisional truth. Religion offers permanent truth. Science accepts doubt. Religion punishes it. Science asks for evidence. Religion asks for obedience. Most people choose certainty because it feels stabilising.
The philosopher William James noted that “faith is the desire to believe fulfilled.” Certainty is not the friend of truth. It is the enemy of anxiety.
4. Children, Agency and the Supernatural Bias
Studies in developmental psychology show that children naturally assume agency behind events. They see purpose everywhere. Clouds are there to give shade. Rivers exist so people can drink. Trees exist so birds can nest. This built-in teleological bias explains why religious ideas survive so easily. They fit children’s natural intuitions perfectly.
Religion is often described as learned, but it is more accurate to say religion is exploited. The brain is already primed to accept supernatural explanations. Culture simply fills in the details.
PART TWO: RELIGION AS SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY
5. Communal Glue: How Belief Creates Belonging
Religion does something very powerful. It creates groups. Shared belief is the oldest form of social cohesion. When humans needed trust and cooperation to survive, shared gods acted as a binding agent. It did not matter whether the beliefs were true. It mattered that they were shared.
Rituals created predictability. Festivals created unity. Sacred stories created identity. A tribe that believed the same story had a stronger sense of belonging than a tribe divided by doubt. This gave religious groups an evolutionary advantage.
Sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that religion was less about gods and more about society worshipping itself. When people worship a god, they are often worshipping the values of their own group in symbolic form.
6. Authority and Obedience: The Cosmic Parent
People often prefer to follow rules rather than interpret the world independently. Religion formalises this by creating a rigid hierarchy. God sits at the top, priests interpret the rules, rulers claim divine support and everyone else is expected to obey.
This structure uses fear and hope as tools. Fear of punishment. Hope of reward. It works because humans are drawn to authority when overwhelmed by uncertainty. A god is the ultimate authority figure. All knowing. All powerful. All seeing.
Psychologist Erich Fromm argued that people escape freedom by submitting to authority. Religion offers this escape in the most absolute form.
7. Justice and the Desire for a Moral Universe
The world is not fair. Good people suffer and bad people prosper. Religion promises that this injustice will be corrected after death. Heaven and hell transform random events into moral accounting.
This is an attractive idea because humans crave fairness. The universe does not provide it, so religion invents it. A perfect judge, perfect justice, perfect balance. These ideas comfort those who feel powerless.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” The evidence of secular societies shows the opposite. When morality is understood as a human responsibility, not a celestial surveillance system, people behave better, not worse.
8. Immortality: The Ultimate Reward
Every successful religion offers eternal life. This is not coincidental. The promise of survival after death is the strongest emotional hook in human history. It solves the greatest fear with the greatest fantasy.
The Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us because we no longer exist does not soothe most people. Religion offers something far more appealing. Eternal significance. Eternal love. Eternal reward. It is a product designed to sell itself.
PART THREE: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GODS
9. Spirits, Storms and the First Supernatural Stories
The earliest gods were not moral beings. They were explanations. Thunder gods. River spirits. Mountain guardians. They explained natural forces at a time when no natural explanation was available.
These early beliefs were functional. They helped early humans feel a sense of control over unpredictable environments. If you believe that storms are caused by angry gods, you can try to appease them. This creates the illusion of influence over chaos.
10. From Foraging to Farming: The Birth of Punishing Gods
When humans settled, inequality emerged. Land had owners. Food required planning. Rules were needed. Religion evolved to police social behaviour. Gods became judges instead of weather spirits. They rewarded obedience and punished disobedience.
The shift from nature gods to moral gods reflects the shift from small bands of hunter gatherers to large agricultural societies. Religion became a tool for enforcing hierarchy. Those at the top claimed divine support.
As the historian Yuval Noah Harari observed, “Large scale human cooperation requires myths.” Gods were the first large scale myths.
11. Empires and the Industrialisation of Religion
Empires needed ideological unity. A population unified by one god was easier to control than a population divided by many. This is why monotheism spread through imperial conquest rather than philosophical persuasion.
Priests became administrators. Temples became banks and record offices. Kings became divine or semi divine figures. Religion and state became inseparable.
Edward Gibbon captured it bluntly: “The various modes of worship… were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
12. Gods Shaped by Culture
A revealing truth: every god reflects the culture that created it.
• Warrior cultures produce war gods.
• Agricultural societies produce harvest gods.
• Patriarchal societies produce male gods.
• Tribal societies produce territorial gods.
No eternal being should reflect local customs and climate. Yet every religion does.
See also our article on blasphemy.
PART FOUR: THE MODERN WORLD AND THE FRAGILITY OF GODS
13. Science Rewrote the Story
The gods once explained everything. Disease, storms, earthquakes, the origin of life, the movement of the planets. Science slowly replaced each explanation.
• Germ theory replaced demonic possession.
• Meteorology replaced angry sky gods.
• Astronomy replaced geocentrism.
• Evolution replaced divine creation.
The space left for gods shrinks every century. What remains are moral commands, metaphysical claims and cultural identity, not explanations of nature.
Carl Sagan put it plainly: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Religion has survived by providing extraordinary claims with no evidence at all.
14. Morality Without Supernatural Surveillance
The idea that morality requires religion is contradicted by the real world. Secular societies consistently outperform religious societies in measures of wellbeing, equality, literacy, healthcare and social stability.
Morality originates in cooperation, empathy and shared interest. It is older than religion and not dependent on it.
See also our article on morality without gods.
15. Why Religion Persists
Religion persists because it offers three things science does not try to offer.
• Identity
• Community
• Psychological comfort
People do not cling to religion because its claims are true. They cling because the cost of abandoning it feels personal, social and emotional.
Political identities also fuse with religious ones. When a belief becomes a badge, evidence cannot dislodge it. Challenges feel like attacks.
George Orwell wrote that people often believe falsehoods because they are “emotionally satisfying.” Religion survives on satisfaction, not verification.
PART FIVE: THE COLLAPSE OF THE GOD MODEL
16. The Problem of Too Many Gods
Every religion claims exclusivity. They contradict one another in doctrine, origin stories, ethics and cosmology. If divine truth were real, these contradictions should not exist.
Instead, religions multiply according to geography, language and culture. This demonstrates human fabrication, not divine revelation.
17. Selective Revelation: Miracles That Avoid Cameras
Revelations never occur where verification is possible. Miracles vanish the moment scrutiny appears. Modern technology has ended the age of spectacular divine intervention.
The only miracles that survive are personal experiences. These are psychologically real but not evidence of divine activity. Every religion produces them, which means they are a feature of the human mind, not a supernatural realm.
David Hume wrote that no testimony of a miracle has ever been strong enough to outweigh the likelihood of error or deception. That assessment still stands.
18. Human Shaped Morality and Human Shaped Gods
Religious morality always reflects human society.
• Ancient texts permit slavery because the societies that wrote them used slavery.
• They restrict women because the societies that wrote them were patriarchal.
• They condemn rival tribes because the societies that wrote them were tribal.
A perfect god would not adopt the prejudices of ancient nomads. A perfect god would not command genocide, restrict diet or regulate clothing. Yet the gods of scripture do exactly that, because the authors did.
PART SIX: A FUTURE WITHOUT GODS
19. What Happens When We Let Go
If we remove gods from human life, what remains is not emptiness but responsibility. Meaning becomes chosen. Purpose becomes deliberate. Morality becomes human. Progress becomes possible.
Life without gods is not bleak. It is honest. It demands courage, not obedience. It demands maturity, not fear.
Jean Paul Sartre argued that life has no prewritten purpose, but this is not a tragedy. It is freedom. We become authors, not characters.
20. Freedom From Fear
Without gods, there is no eternal surveillance. No threat of supernatural punishment. No fear of cosmic judgement. What remains is the task of living well.
People often assume that meaning requires a divine script. The opposite is true. A meaning you choose is more authentic than one imposed from above.
Richard Dawkins wrote, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Life is precious because it is finite. Death gives life urgency, value and texture.
See our article on meaning without a master.
21. The Cultural Renaissance of Secular Societies
Where religion loosens its grip, creativity flourishes. Scientific discovery accelerates. Inquiry becomes open. Debate becomes healthier. Diversity becomes easier to accept. Societies become less brittle and more adaptable.
Philosopher A C Grayling observed, “Humanity will flourish when it takes responsibility for its own destiny.” Religion gives responsibility away. Secularism returns it.
22. Conclusion: The Last God We Will Ever Invent
Humans search for gods because we are pattern seeking, meaning seeking, comfort seeking creatures. We search because we fear death, we desire justice and we long for community. We search because our ancestors needed explanations that science had not yet discovered.
Understanding this is not an attack on humanity. It is an admission that we are imaginative animals trying to survive in an indifferent universe. The tragedy is not that we once believed in gods. The tragedy is that many still hold to ancient stories long after their explanatory power has been outgrown.
If humanity ever steps beyond the need for gods, it will not be because we solved every mystery. It will be because we chose truth over comfort and responsibility over obedience.
A civilisation that does not need gods is not poorer. It is braver. It is more honest. It chooses to look at reality directly and finds meaning within that clarity.