The Great Gods Hypothesis: what it is and how it explains civilization

Materialist reductionism postulates that mental states can be reduced to physical states, that is; for everything that happens to us, we can find an explanation in our body, its systems and its way of functioning.

This way of thinking is the one that still dominates among the great majority of scientists of our time. From the field of sociobiology, attempts are made to explain all the behaviors of all living beings, including humans, from genetic egoism. It is a path that is based on the scientific method as the only way to know the truth and explain reality. However, according to his detractors, he ignores a large part of it, closing himself off to the things that exist that go beyond the physical, where spirituality would be found.

In the animal world we already discovered that not only genetic selfishness exists, many species show cooperation. Although altruistic cooperation, where there is no individual selfish objective on the part of the subjects that make up the group, is fully manifested in human beings.

Altruistic cooperation has long been a matter of debate, what makes human beings cooperate in large groups of subjects that in principle have no genetic relationship? Within the proposed explanations, different causes have been exposed as agents of altruistic cooperation; the establishment of agricultural cultivation, war conflicts or religion.

Within the theories that have sounded with more force, we find the hypothesis of the great gods or the moralizing gods, which establishes religion as the key to understanding this behavior. But what exactly does this unverified theory say? In this article we will explain in detail the hypothesis of the great gods and its validity today.

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What does the Great Gods Hypothesis propose?

The great gods are defined as beings with divine properties that punish moral transgressions. The Great Gods Hypothesis proposes that the cooperation between strangers that occurs in large societies arose, in part, as a consequence of punishments. moralizing attributed to these deities.

The very hypothesis of the great gods has changed over time, initially presenting itself as a necessary cultural innovation to increasing sociopolitical complexity and later, in a more diluted version of the hypothesis, as just one element within a set of variables that, together with other cultural factors, contributed to the increase in sociopolitical complexity, although not to its appearance and spread initial.

According to the first hypothesis of the great gods, the belief in the supernatural application of broad ethical and moral norms that govern human affairs facilitated, together with the prehistoric transition to agriculture, the increase in sociopolitical complexity. Thus, the great gods were the key factor in the emergence of large groups that were triggered by agricultural cultivation.

Later formulations of this hypothesis emphasized that the idea of ​​a Great God moralizing was part of a great number of religious innovations that gradually evolved with the construction of larger and increasingly complex.

According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe that God will punish them.. However, new data have come to contradict this idea.

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Is the Great Gods Hypothesis true?

The hypothesis of the great gods established as a cause of the evolution towards more complex societies the belief in a great god.

Until a few years ago, different forms of evidence had been used: psychological experiments, cross-cultural comparative analyzes and historical case studies to test the hypothesis of the great gods. However, the results supporting the great god hypotheses are controversial and contradictory. In some cases it is concluded that the role of religious elements was fundamental, assuming them as one of the causes of the expansion of the societies, in other studies these appeared after the increase in sociopolitical complexity, and contributed to sustain and expand the expansion. Although they always acted as a causal factor and not as a consequence.

Recently, the true role of the "great gods" in increasing sociopolitical complexity and the rise of great societies has been investigated against historical data. These have come to contradict this hypothesis, reversing the causal relationship As stated, belief in a moralizing deity has been found to be the result, not the cause, of the evolution of complex societies.

The results obtained thanks to Big Data show that the important increases in social complexity actually occurred before the emergence of the great gods, and that, therefore, these did not contribute to the evolution of sociopolitical complexity, as predicted by the great gods hypothesis. gods.

For statistical analysis, the researchers used Seshat, a large database. Seshat offers an enormous collection of historical information and has made it possible to test and confront the data, the different hypotheses that existed on the rise and fall of societies around the world through the centuries, such as the hypothesis of the great gods.

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Big Data applied to the origin of civilizations

The objective of the study was to establish at what point in the history of the world the Great Gods appeared, in order to establish the relationship with the increase in sociopolitical complexity, and the role of moralizing religion in the evolution of cooperation between beings humans.

To test the Great Gods hypothesis with Seshat data collected data on more than 50 aspects of sociopolitical complexity, which include social scale, hierarchical levels and institutional sophistication. These data were collected in 30 geographic regions from the beginning of the Neolithic to the beginning of the industrial and/or colonial periods.

The increase in socio-political complexity is easy to establish, however, one of the main challenges facing any The attempt to test the Great Gods hypothesis is to grasp the extent to which the gods care about the morality of behavior human. A method is needed to operationalize the concept of Great Gods, since this is not directly measurable, a measurement process must be established based on other related phenomena. And a way to encode its presence or absence in ancient belief systems. In this case, it was decided to measure the presence of two aspects of religion called moralizing, the superiority of the gods over human affairs and divinity.

In almost all parts of the world where data is available, moralizing deities appear after the increase in social complexity, they tend to follow it, rather than precede it. To this concrete result, we must add that the moralizing gods come after the rituals. These rituals are already a form of community, since they give a sense of identity and belonging to the same group of people who share a spirituality. Rituals act as a kind of social adhesive, thanks to them, people, at first unknown, they act in a cooperative way for a good that goes beyond their objectives individualistic. These findings suggest that collective identity is more important than religious beliefs in promoting social cooperation.

Big data and social theories

Until recently, it was impossible to distinguish causal relationships in social theories, since quantitative data from world history and its societies were lacking.

The complexity of a society can be estimated from social characteristics such as the population, territory, the complexity of government institutions and systems of information. Religious data includes beliefs in the supernatural realization of reciprocity, justice, and loyalty, as well as the frequency and normalization of religious rituals.

Seshat, the tool used to refute the great god hypothesis, is described as the global historical database and is currently the most complete collection of historical and prehistoric data. As its website explains, "this database systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved throughout weather". Currently, it contains thousands of records of social complexity, religion, and other characteristics of 500 societies, spanning 10,000 years of human history.

The analysis of hundreds of variables related to social complexity, religion, war, agriculture, and other characteristics of human culture and society. They allow researchers to test a long list of theories and hypotheses about the history of the world and humanity. This includes conflicting theories about how and why humans evolved to cooperate in large-scale societies.