Religious behavior in animals
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Animal faith is the study of animal behaviours that suggest proto-religious faith. There is no evidence that any non-human animals believe in God or gods, pray, worship, have any notion of metaphysics, create artifacts with ritual significance, or many other behaviours typical of human religion. Whether animals can have religious faith is dependent on a sufficiently open definition of religion. Thus, if by religion one means a "non-anthropocentric, non-anthropomorphic, non-theistic, and non-logocentric trans-species prototype definition of religion", ritual behaviour can be interpreted in the actions of chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins and other animals.
The study of proto-religions in modern animals is relevant to the study of the development of religion in modern humans and their recent ancestors.
See also
- Evolutionary ethics
- Evolutionary origin of religions
- Evolution of morality
- The Origins of Virtue
- Veneer theory
