Mdthbs

This might be hard to answer if we think about all other life on our planet, even with animals such as dolphins, octopi, chimpanzees and others that show relatively high levels of intelligence but as we cant communicate fully with them we cant truly understand their thought processes as yet.

There has been footage of chimpanzees slowly walking up to the same tree and throwing a rock and a large hole in the tree trunk slowly forming from repeated throws, this making experts wonder if this could be a religious event but it could likely just be game.

Looking at the lifestyles and needs of early humans and how we think our extinct homo genus cousins lived and what lead to humans embracing theism is a way but I don't want to basically create a species that is almost a clone of human behaviour but with alien bodies.

So my question is what at minimum would a species need to be capable of, for them to need or want to believe in a God and then form a religion?

This question isn't about their environment, weather they are predator or prey, how they came to be more intelligent or how the religion started, it's more about the kinds of behaviours they have that show different forms of intelligence.

My first thought is they need a large enough community with a sophisticated enough level of communication as well as a good enough memory to allow for story's to be told and passed down.

This large community would also show their are capable of relatively complex emotions, leading to being able to love or adorn whatever they worship.

Maybe they would also need to somehow show behaviours of having an imagination, so it wasn't just a case of taking orders from others to worship, this could be shown in creative forms like art and music.

Any other suggestions of the minimum intelligent behaviour needed for a religious lifeform would really help designing this species.

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In order to form a religion around a deity character, a species needs:

1. The curiosity to question the world around them and how it works.


2. The creativity and abstraction capabilities to make up theories about it.


3. The social structure which leads them to the theory that those things they do not understand are the result of the actions of an intelligent deity with certain characteristics.


4. The communication ability to discuss the nature of that deity with other members of their species and come to a consensus about what characteristics that deity has and how that deity is to be worshiped.

Good memory might not actually be required. If the species isn't particularly good at preserving information, then it might simply result in religions which change very rapidly.

Cultural activity like art can be used as part of religious worship, but they don't necessarily need to. Sure, most religions we know of in Earth's history are mostly remembered by the cultural artifacts they produced, but that impression might be heavily impacted by survivorship bias. Who knows how many religious myths existed for centuries as purely oral tradition and were then forgotten without trace because their worshipers didn't produce any artifacts which tell us of that religion today? For example, we know Stonehenge was very likely a place of religious worship over 5000 years ago. But we have no idea about the details of the mythology of whatever religious cult was practiced there, because the faithful did not create any cultural artifacts like drawings, sculptures or writings which tell us what, how or why they worshipped.

Required intellectual level - early hominid

(warning: good evidence is scanty, thus usually far reaching conclusions are being drawn from a few bones)

Lower bound:

The hominids, called Homo naledi, had brains about a third the size of ours but had modern-looking hands and backbones. The first fossils were only found in 2013 and their discovery has caused heated debate ever since. [...]

The second cave is about 100 yards away from the first cave, the discovery of which led to debate about when Homo naledi lived and whether the pre-humans had deliberately buried their dead.

"This likely adds weight to the hypothesis that Homo naledi was using dark, remote places to cache its dead," University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

"What are the odds of a second, almost identical occurrence happening by chance?”

source

Higher bound:

The second period, the Middle Paleolithic, occurred when Homo erectus was replaced by Homo sapiens neanderthalensis about 130,000 years ago. Unlike their ancestors, these new hominids buried their dead. Several Neanderthal graves have been found with grave goods, indicating that these hominids had some sort of belief system with notions of an after-life.

source

BTW: If you expect a universalistic, monotheistic religion with proper theology - then it was even challenging for our specie.