According to this theory, humans intuitively perceive helpful or harmful phenomena through a ‘dyadic template’ consisting of an agent and a patient 9, 10. We draw our hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, focusing especially on the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests that phenomena will gain supernatural explanations when they have an ambiguous causal agent 8. If people use religious beliefs to explain the world, what about the world do they seek to explain? We answer this question by surveying supernatural explanations in a global sample of societies. Although this reasoning is popular, we still know little about the gaps that people use religion to fill. But a broader interpretation of ‘god of the gaps’ is that people use supernatural agency to explain phenomena that have ambiguous causation. A narrow interpretation of this account could be that people use religion as a stopgap when a phenomenon has no clear scientific explanation (for example, the origin of the universe) 7.

Since the nineteenth century, scientists, philosophers and theologians have interpreted supernatural explanations using a ‘god of the gaps’ hypothesis-people infer supernatural agency behind phenomena that they do not understand 5, 6. In these examples, humans make supernatural explanations by claiming that a supernatural agent (for example, a god, ancestor spirit or witch) or supernatural force (for example, karma, evil eye) is responsible for some earthly event. In the modern world, 90% of Muslim Tunisians believe that the evil eye can cause physical harm 3, and many American Christians perceived the COVID-19 pandemic as a form of apocalyptic divine punishment 4. Ancient Chinese and Korean societies used divine intervention to explain and justify dynastic change 1, and Egyptians, Aztecs, Celtic and Tiv people used the will of gods to explain celestial cycles 2. Humans have long used religious beliefs to understand the world. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them.

Science phenomena group discussion