Afterlife Beliefs: An Evolutionary Perspective
Part 1 of my series on evolutionary explanations for afterlife beliefs
This is the first part of a new three-part series about the origins of belief in life after death. The series tackles the topic from an evolutionary perspective. I’ll be releasing one new part a month.
In this part, I’ll give an overview of the three main evolutionary approaches to afterlife beliefs, then do a deep dive into the first one: the idea that afterlife beliefs are an adaptation, like the eagle’s eye and the elephant’s trunk. The overview is for everyone; the deep dive is for paid subscribers. Check out the other benefits of a paid subscription here.
Getting to Grips With an Afterlife
We’re all going to die and we all know it. We have our first glimmerings of this unpleasant fact in early childhood, and we live with it for the rest of our lives. Sometimes it sits at the forefront of our attention; other times it lurks in the background - but it’s always there somewhere, casting a dark shadow across our hopes for meaning and permanence.
From a zoological perspective, this is a rather peculiar situation to be in. As far as we know, no other species is aware of its own mortality. It would be strange if they were - but it’s no less strange for us. Stranger still, though, is the fact that so many people, while fully cognizant of their own looming demise, believe that death is not the end.
Afterlife beliefs of one sort or another are a central facet of most of the world’s religions. Early scholars of religion accorded this fact a central place in their thinking. The psychologist and philosopher William James, for instance, argued that the wish for immortality is the ultimate wellspring of religious belief and practice. Curiously, though, afterlife beliefs have been largely absent in recent scholarship on the psychology of religion.
In this series, I’ll explore an increasingly popular approach to explaining religious behavior - the Darwinian approach - and ask what light it might shed on the origins of afterlife beliefs.
The most obvious hypothesis stemming from an evolutionary perspective is that the belief in life after death, and religiosity more generally, is an adaptation crafted by natural selection. That’s the hypothesis we’ll consider in this post. Note, though, that it’s only one among several hypotheses for the evolutionist - and as we’ll see, probably not the most plausible one in this case.
A second hypothesis is that belief in an afterlife is an evolutionary byproduct or “spandrel” - that is, a side effect of other adaptations, rather than an adaptation in and of itself. The bellybutton is a good example of a byproduct; it wasn’t specifically favored by natural selection, but instead is a functionless side-effect of another trait that was: the umbilical cord. Applying this framework to afterlife beliefs, the claim would be that, like the bellybutton, these convictions are not adaptations but are byproducts of cognitive capacities selected for other purposes. Likely candidates include the fear of death and theory of mind. We’ll consider this approach in part two of the series.
A third and final Darwinian hypothesis involves applying evolutionary principles not to genes or biology, but to “pieces” of culture or memes. One might argue, for instance, that afterlife beliefs were subject to a process analogous to natural selection, and that they survived and thrived because they were good for the individuals holding them, good for their groups, or good simply at persisting in people’s minds and motivating them to pass them on. That’s the approach we’ll explore in the final part of the series.
Before getting to any of this, though, let’s set the stage with a brief survey of the range and diversity of afterlife beliefs in the world and throughout human history.
A Survey of Afterlife Beliefs
Afterlife beliefs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. No two cultures have quite the same conception of what life after death might involve. At the same time, however, a number of broad themes can be detected in the afterlife beliefs of the world’s religions.
To begin with, we can draw a distinction between afterlife beliefs that involve personal survival and those that don’t.