Religion through an evolutionary lens: An ascetic practice model in dialogue with adaptation and byproduct theories
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications April 6, 2026 Xinyue Tian, Benqian Sang
Religious practices like prayer, chanting, asceticism, and meditation activate pleasure-related circuits in the brain, according to neurobiological and psychological evidence. Ascetic practices do not inherently conflict with the human tendency to seek pleasure. Religion's evolutionary adaptability allows it to sustain well-being even with low resource consumption. The paper reinterprets religious practices as a strategy of finding joy in hardship and proposes that faith may result from practice rather than cause it, with deities as peripheral institutional tools. The Ascetic Practice Model is offered as an evolutionary-friendly framework for dialogue with adaptationist and byproduct accounts.