--- Celso Vieira, in "The capricious gods counterattack: on what the empirical method and the rational gods model miss" Academia Letters, 2021
From the Conclusion
According to the big gods hypothesis, moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions play a key role in reinforcing human cooperation. Hence, a religion with a big god is instrumental in the development of complex societies. This hypothesis has been questioned recently. . . . Factors such as wars and accessibility of resources seem to bear a closer connection with rising and falling complex societies. Wars and drastic resource depletion follow heavy-tailed distributions, that is, a body of events in which rare outliers are big enough to distort the mean of the whole. . . .
Regularity-centred models will not work to make predictions or estimates. The advised way to deal with a potential catastrophic event is a zero-risk attitude. However, it is not easy to advocate for it. Heavy events are rare, so people are expected to adopt self-constraining behaviour based on unavailable observed evidence. To make the perils more vivid, older generations who experienced heavy events might want to find a way to convey this information for the generations to come. Storytelling might work. Again, because of the rarity, no foreseeable gratification for the self-constraining behaviour is available. If so, piety, that is, prudence plus a humbling recognition of uncertainty might reinforce the right attitude. According to the previous discussion, capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety. Thus, capriciousness might be a side of religiosity playing a non-negligible role in the avoidance of catastrophes by long-lasting societies.
