Resorting to gods and witches to explain natural phenomena is universal

The leaders of the Shincheonji Christian sect in South Korea saw a divine message in the coronavirus and recommended that their faithful not comply with health protection measures.

In the image, the facade of its main temple in Daegu, the Korean city most affected by the pandemic.KIM KYUNG-HOON (Reuters)

During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, several groups of fundamentalist Christians in the United States and South Korea saw the apocalypse arrive.

For some evangelicals, SARS-CoV-2 is not a simple virus from the

family related to previous pathogens that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome.

It was a punishment from God, even a warning of the second coming of Jesus.

Although science has narrowed the space for these types of beliefs, they are still there: an ethnographic study of a hundred societies on the planet confirms that, when there is no clear or easy explanation for a phenomenon, humans tend to look for a supernatural explanation. .

A group of scientists has compiled ethnographic information from 114 societies on five continents.

They were particularly interested in non-Western and less globalized cultures.

Although most of them had a simple structure, as in the case of the Apaches or the Yanomami, they also included in the sample examples of great social complexity, such as ancient Rome, the Aztecs or the Turkish civilization.

There are hardly any European examples because, as the study's lead author, Joshua Jackson, from Northwestern University (United States), says, they tried to have as diverse a sample as possible, “so that each society we sampled had a different religious tradition and had little contact with other societies;

The results of their work, published in the scientific journal

, show that all but one of the societies analyzed have extraordinary explanations for ordinary events.

The only one that is out of the norm are the buruso or brusho.

Made up of barely 90,000 people, it is a town scattered among villages in the mountains of northern Pakistan.

Islamized 300 years ago, they still preserve their previous traditions and their legends say that they come from soldiers of Alexander the Great.

"We cannot say why this group did not have supernatural explanations," Jackson says in an email, since there is hardly any ethnographic data on this town.

“Most likely it is because the ethnographer simply chose not to describe the religion of the Buruso people and not because they do not have supernatural explanations,” he adds.

In all societies, 96% of cultures attribute a supernatural origin to the disease (to all or some of them).

Famines and food shortages caused by bad harvests or plagues would also have supernatural agents in 92% of cases.

Other natural disasters remain at 90%.

But the result that the authors of the study stand out the most is that for social phenomena (such as robberies, murders or wars), the supernatural explanation is less recurrent.

Thus, although peoples such as the Comanches decided when to go to war based on the predictions of the tribal sorcerer, only 67% of the societies in the sample seek a divine cause for human wars.

In the case of theft, the percentage drops to 26%.

Only in the case of murder, the supernatural is once again the dominant explanation, with 82%.

“The tendency to explain phenomena using supernatural explanations is something that is part of the human condition”

Joshua Jackson, a researcher at Northwestern University, United States

"Our research suggests that the tendency to explain phenomena using supernatural explanations is something that is part of the human condition," Jackson says.

“Actually, this idea goes back to scientists and philosophers like Charles Darwin, David Hume, and Edward Tylor, who suggested that humans have a basic tendency to explain the phenomena of the world by some kind of anthropomorphic force.

When something (a plague or a storm) doesn't have a clear human cause, people may turn to supernatural agents like gods or spirits,” he adds.

The latter could also serve to explain the difference they have observed between natural and social events.

“Social phenomena often have clear human causes, so we are less likely to invoke a supernatural agency,”

The work also found that greater or lesser social complexity affected the weight of supernatural explanations.

In all societies, the recourse to the divine or magical is greater in the case of droughts, lightning or other disasters, than when it comes to robberies or wars.

But as human groups are larger, have greater social stratification and more socioeconomic development, the distance between them decreases.

The authors of the paper are not clear about the reason for this.

In their conclusions, they allude to several possibilities: "It may be because people do not know and trust each other less in larger societies and this less trust would translate into beliefs about witchcraft and spells."

Another possibility that they point out is that in larger complex societies, problems such as theft or war are of more concern and, "they are more likely to develop supernatural explanations that explain why these phenomena occur."

The low percentage of supernatural justifications to explain the theft does not have a clear explanation for the authors either.

In the work they point out a relationship that should be investigated between religion and death.

While the other five natural or social events that they have studied all cause death, stealing does not necessarily imply murdering the other.

In their conclusions, the researchers maintain that, whatever the reason, the focus of religious beliefs changes as societies grow: “People are more likely to use religious beliefs to make sense of the social world, rather than to only to the natural world.

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