The ‘Big Gods Hypothesis’ offered a solution to the origins of religion & of complex societies by proposing that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers

Whitehouse, Harvey, Pieter François, Daniel Hoyer, Kevin C. Feeney, Enrico Cioni, Rosalind Purcell, Robert M. Ross, et al. 2021. “Big Gods Did Not Drive the Rise of Big Societies Throughout World History.” OSF Preprints. April 3. doi:10.31219/osf.io/mbnvg

Abstract: The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles. The ‘Big Gods Hypothesis’ offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of Big Gods and big societies, the relationship between the two is disputed, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To address these issues, we analyze data in the Seshat Global History Databank that coded 309 past societies for variables capturing beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment and social complexity. The longitudinal (time-resolved) nature of Seshat data enables us to test evolutionary hypotheses about processes generating social change and distinguish between competing causal scenarios. We find that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment only appear after the largest increases in social complexity and that a formal analysis designed to test for causal relationships failed to detect a statistically significant effect of moralizing supernatural punishment on social complexity.