Angry Gods

The Science of Religion Goes Very Wrong

In 2019, the latest imposing new paper on religion was an ambitious Big Data project. Titled "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history," and published in top science journal Nature, the project got its start in 2011.

An international team led by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford, tracked 414 societies from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution (encompassing 10,000 years) over 30 geographic regions. The team relied on a boffo database of academic articles called Seshat, named (it seems) after the ancient Egyptian goddess of literacy and numeracy.

And what did the researchers tell the world they had found? That religion does not fuel the development of complex societies.¹ Some specifics:

• The "moralizing gods" hypothesis argues that societies became complex because of a belief that morality derived from powerful supernatural sources. Adherence to this belief enabled humans who did not know each other to trust each other more.

• However, the Seshat data show that moralizing gods follow large increases in social complexity rather than preceding them. "Moralizing gods," says the study's abstract, "are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established."

• The study also apparently found that ritual, not belief, cemented religious traditions. This suggests that ritual practices were more important to the initial rise of social complexity than were the particular contents of religious belief. "When it comes to the initial rise of social complexity," the study's authors wrote, "how you worship may ultimately have been more important than who you worship."²

The Magic Million

These findings were, needless to say, catnip to many social science academics and science writers. In July 2021, Retraction Watch noted that the paper "has been cited 49 times, according to Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science—giving it a Highly Cited Paper designation among papers of the same age."³

And popular science media chimed right in. From Scientific American:

"This paper has done substantial damage to the big gods hypothesis, which fits in with what we had previously found," says Russell Gray, an evolutionist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was part of the Austronesian study but not the new one. The new results also weaken the idea that broad supernatural punishment is needed for complex societies, he says. "This is by far the best thing I've seen out of the much-hyped Seshat project so far."⁴

The researchers were, of course, anxious to claim that they were not attempting to discredit religion. Yahoo News quoted anthropologist Patrick Savage as asserting, "We are not saying anything about the value of religion. We are not saying it is good or bad, but we are saying it has a deep and consistent relationship with societies throughout world history. Religion is deeply intertwined with what it means to be human, for better and for worse."⁵ Peter Peregrine, who "literally co-wrote the book on Anthropology," according to a PBS story, "thinks it's important to remember that studying religion is not itself an attack on religion—and in a way, it's an attempt to understand human biology."⁶ And so forth.

Pop science writers knew better, of course, as their headlines showed: "Big Religion May Have Gotten Too Much Credit for the Evolution of Modern Society," declared Scientific American. "Which came first: society or a fear of god?", was a PBS News Hour's leading question. And Yahoo News confidently announced that "When Ancient Societies Hit a Million People, Vengeful Gods Appeared."⁷

Indeed, "a million people" became something of a magic number: Patrick Savage said, "It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level. First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."⁸

Too Quick on the Draw

Yet despite how well all this fit with what most people on the tenure track believed, there was some unease among professionals. In an article in Scientific American, anthropologist Edward Slingerland notes that many of the entries in the Seshat database do not list any expert consultation. The article continues:

"That just worries me," [Slingerland] says. Many elements in the database—such as belief in pro-social religions—are subject to interpretation and debate, even among experts who have spent careers studying a particular society and time period, he notes. Without experts to check every data entry, he adds, the database could be underestimating uncertainty or mischaracterizing a society. "I'm not saying the data is all wrong," he says. "It's just that we don't know—and that, in a way, is just as bad because not knowing means you can't take seriously the analysis."⁹

In 2021, the paper was retracted.

But it was perfect! So what happened? According to Retraction Watch:

Immediately after publication, a group led by Bret Beheim, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, submitted a response to the journal [Nature] questioning the validity of the results. Beheim and his colleagues posted a preprint of their argument on PsyArXiv in early May 2019. Nature accepted the article on Feb. 18, 2021, roughly 21 months later.¹⁰

And then came this in Nature:

A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods—and not the other way around—has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.¹¹

The key issue, according to Retraction Watch, was that "the original paper treats absence of evidence for moralizing gods as evidence of their absence." According to the retraction notice: "we accept that we should have labelled moralizing gods as 'absent' or 'inferred absent' rather than 'unknown' in portions of our dataset before the dates of the first appearance, rather than converting 'NAs' to zeros during the phase of analysis."

Well, yes. In fact, as Joe Henrich, chair of Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, told PBS, "These guys were a little bit quick on the draw with putting this paper out because the data is largely not checked."¹²

But that stems from a much bigger problem, which Henrich also noted. That problem is "forward bias": the assumption that the first time a given thing enters the historical record is the first time that it actually occurred. This is not at all likely. The survival of historical records often seems capricious. We can be fairly certain that most customs and beliefs are older than the oldest records left of them. "Henrich argues that forward bias may be large with people who often practice doctrinal rituals long before they write about them or otherwise document their history."¹³ In short, religion could certainly have been part of the founding of more complex civilizations long before it was "dug up," so to speak, by archaeologists.

Slicker Paper, Same Claim

Whitehouse et al. claim that they have now "thoroughly refined" their data and analyses, and have found that their original conclusions are still strongly supported. Having retracted their 2019 paper, they are now seeking a publisher for the revised one.

It should be noted, too, that Beheim's group, whose efforts led to the retraction, was not opposed to the philosophical approach of the debunkers of moralizing gods at all. Quite the contrary. As Beheim told Retraction Watch: "I look forward to reading the . . . revised argument. The objection I had to the original analysis wasn't so much their conclusion, but that they weren't transparent about the amount of missing data involved. If our critique can help them nail that problem down, I think the field will progress."¹⁴

Patrick Savage, a member of the original research team andPBS's quoted expert, agrees, adding that these days, people have become attached to social media influencers or politicians rather than to religion. "These are our modern, ever-evolving flocks," he said. "The world is becoming a much less religious place in many ways, so we may be reaching a new period where social cooperation takes different forms," he added.¹⁵

So here is a prediction: The researchers will be back with a slicker, more refined, Big Data thesis. Whether they (or anyone) can prove anything at all about the undocumented past won't really matter. Different paper, same claim—and this time it will have free, much more favorable publicity.

If nothing else, it helps us understand why so many people don't trust Science.

Notes
1. Harvey Whitehouse et al., "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history," Nature (March 20, 2019; retracted July 7, 2021): nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4.
2. Marcus Woo, "Big Religion May Have Gotten Too Much Credit for the Evolution of Modern Society: Contrary to a popular hypothesis, pro-social religions didn't kick-start complex social systems," Scientific American (March 20, 2019): https://bit.ly/3kHlOjv.
3. Adam Marcus, "Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods," Retraction Watch (July 7, 2021): https://bit.ly/2WHl6ul.
4. Woo, ibid., note 2.
5. Charles Q. Choi, "When Ancient Societies Hit a Million People, Vengeful Gods Appeared," Yahoo News (March 21, 2019): https://yhoo.it/3zuNjTf.
6. Nsikan Akan, "Which came first: society or a fear of god?", PBS Newshour (March 20, 2019): https://to.pbs.org/3jvcJe2.
7. Woo, ibid., note 2; Akan, ibid., note 6; Choi, ibid., note 5.
8. Choi, ibid., note 5.
9. Woo, ibid., note 2.
10. Marcus, ibid., note 3.
11. Bret Beheim et al., "Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods," Nature (July 7, 2021): https://go.nature.com/3Bv1w3r.
12. Akan, ibid., note 6.
13. Akan, ibid., note 6.
14. Marcus, ibid., note 3.
15. Akan, ibid., note 6.