It seems to me to imply that such emotions must be dependent on a belief in a 'higher power' or the related concept of an afterlife. It's more likely they simply feel the loss and 'honor' the dead -- or are offering things so they'll wake up.

Many animals have a culture. Many are more intelligent than most give them credit (crows even recognize individual human faces). Knowing a member of their group is dead, and acknowledging it, is hardly religious. Even atheist humans might honor a lost one in a similar manner as the examples given f/ animals. It's a tribute, not a belief in supernatural entities.

Last edited Sat Jan 31, 2015, 07:16 PM - Edit history (1)

on edit-- you seem to have the cart before the horse, i.e. "It seems to me to imply that such emotions must be dependent on a belief in a 'higher power' or the related concept of an afterlife" is precisely the opposite of what is implied by the articles. Rather, what develops in humans as belief in a higher power or afterlife MUST BE DEPENDENT on such emotions which existed for millions of years in other species.

If you simply define religion in purely human cognitive terms, then by definition animals are incapable of it. Case closed, problem solved, but it seems like an evasion of the essential question posed by the article.

Obviously animals don't have thoughts about religion like those humans that attempt to explain the universe. But is religion purely a matter of thinking in symbolic terms, or is it (equally if not more so) a matter of feeling awe and connectedness? Schaefer argues the latter:

I don't think it's necessarily a direct route. Yes, non-primates also seem to have a sense of 'morality' -- another reply mentions elephant incident -- but just how closely are religion and morality tied, at least 'at the beginning'?

If religion is tied to 'awe' then it began as a cognitive wondering of why things are as they are. While animals have culture, some even seem to have a sense of 'future,' but not much evidence as to wonder about the nature of things. Combine the awe with curiosity -- the 'why' -- add cultural more and a good dose of creativity and a religion may be born. It needs neither morals nor emotional attachment. But it does require a cognizance beyond non-humans. (Yes, awe is defined as an emotion, but one attached to authority or the sublime. Non-humans recognize authority, but in awe of it?)

So to the question of religion entailing thinking or feeling, I say thinking. Once all the ingredients are there, an influential individual gets others to believe his/her creative idea as to why something happens (like lightning). Once enough are convinced, the idea takes hold. Without a supernatural entity the idea might be 'scientific,' a natural explanation. But it seems more likely that an invisible, supernatural explanation came first.

Once the idea of the supernatural appears, rituals form from 'do this & that happens' coincidences. All that entails thinking, not feeling.

Sorry. I don't think I'm quite explaining my thoughts adequately. (Partly because it takes so long to type them out on the phone.) If someone responds, I'll try to clarify. Try.

Last edited Sun Feb 1, 2015, 12:02 PM - Edit history (3)

Humans were behaving-- and possibly behaving ritualistically-- for a very long time before religious language appeared. My guess is that if we hook up electrodes to people "thinking" in religious terms, we will find that it involves different and "deeper" brain structures than thinking about e.g. a math question. Worth doing some digging to see what has already been established on this front.

OK-- the limbic system is activated and the parietal lobe inhibited in religious experience according to this recent article. Animals could certainly have comparable experiences based on the brain activity involved. Excerpt:

How 'spontaneous' social norms emerge

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12291895

endemic to religious practices.

another form:

Does a dog have Buddha nature?

This is analogous to the question of whether non-human animals have souls. Part of my thinking on this comes from my Native American background, which ascribes not just spirit but spiritual power to non-human beings.The other part comes from the obvious fact of evolution. Our "human" attributes must come down to us from a non-human lineage. If humans have Buddha nature, then so do dogs. If I have a soul, then so does the cat who's vying with the phone for my attention at the moment. All of which leads me to the idea that religion and its roots lie deep in our history, well beyond our emergence as a species.

The chimpanzee dances seem to me to be clearly a response not just to awe but to power. Whether the dance is a means to communicate with this power or to control it isn't yet clear. My guess is that it's both. These observation s dovetail closely with Dudley Young's argument in Origins of the Sacred that human religion had its genesis on "the dancing ground" where it also became ritualized in the person of the shaman.

The story of Jane Goodall's observations got me to thinking about my own addictive behavior in choosing hiking destinations with waterfalls, or views of rapids, there being some kind of unconscious compulsion to repeat the experience of being near rushing water. Being a native of the coastal region, I didn't really develop this until my 30s but it has been a factor ever since. Not that I have devoted a moment's conscious thought to preferring trails involving waterfalls, or self-talk about "waterfalls are beautiful" -- it's WAY more primitive and elemental than that. There is just a certain feeling, emotional but very visceral, aroused by the very thought of hiking to a waterfall or major rapids, a kind of vicarious sense of being swept along by the power and the beauty. Even just hearing that a newly opened trail has a waterfall on it evokes a thrill. Being in a kayak in whitewater makes this an actual physical experience instead of a vicarious one, but it's also very primitive and pre-linguistic-- "oh wow" is about as complicated as my thought process ever gets in such settings.

So multiply me by hundreds of other men and women up and down the Blue Ridge, or hundreds of thousands of people in other mountain regions around the world, hiking to gawk at waterfalls every weekend to say "oh, wow." It's not church, there's no Bible or hymnal, but at some deep level humans are responding to the same urges those Gombe chimps are at their waterfall. Is it religious? Proto-religious? There is a definite sense of pilgrimage to a sacred place, and in light of the Schaefer and de Waal theories, it is easy enough to envision some kind of continuity between human and animal behavior in such settings.

So your suggestion that the chimps were "awed" by a sense of the power, as well as the beauty, of the waterfall appeals to me a lot.

I would also argue that morality is pre-human. Konrad Lorenz did some good work on this, but the haunting narrative that most exemplifies this was Robert Ardrey's repetition of an incident reported by George Schaller.

A South African farmer shot an elephant in a herd whose range included his property. He did not see that elephant again, and assumed he'd killed her. Weeks later, the herd returned. In the lead, the matriarch carried an elephant shall, which she laid down in sight of the farmer, then led her sisters and daughters away.

At a minimum, this incident constellates the ideas of accusation, guilt, and recognition of wrongdoing by the aggrieved, who are, in this case, not only non-human but non-primates. In turns, this raises not only the question of the origin of abstract moral thinking but puts that morality in the context of a ritualized, embodied response.