The Evolution of Religion

I stumbled upon this fascinating infographic recently. It seems to be fairly accurate, and it always helps seeing the big picture of a topic.

Looking at timelines like this makes me wonder if religion evolves the way life does, or perhaps it evolves the way technology does, or maybe there is no difference at all. Evolution is simply replication and selection, played out over a span of time, and that simple truth accounts for so much.

In any case, the reality is that humans are species whose astonishing success is largely due to our ability to cooperate in mass around shared fictions. As the great historian Yuval Noah Harari notes, we experience these shared fictions as intersubjective realities, which are far more stable and influential then our subjective realities.

The true story of religion is really just the history of our intersubjective realities evolving over time, and I don’t think that makes it any less beautiful or fascinating.