What If Religion Is Not the Answer? Rif Africa’s Bold Research Into Human Consciousness
A research publication exploring the intersection of consciousness, environment, and human behaviour. What if everything you were taught about consciousness is incomplete?
For decades, mainstream science held that consciousness is merely a by-product of brain activity: neurons firing, chemicals reacting, nothing more. But a growing body of research is challenging this assumption. Some physicists now propose that consciousness may be fundamental to the universe itself, not something the brain produces, but something it receives, like a radio tuning into a signal that already exists.
The “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” theory by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff suggests quantum processes in brain microtubules connect human consciousness to the fundamental structure of spacetime. Meanwhile, the “Integrated Information Theory” by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposes that consciousness is a fundamental property of any system with sufficient complexity and integration, meaning it may exist, in varying degrees, throughout the universe.
These are not fringe ideas. They are being debated in peer-reviewed journals, at academic conferences, and in research institutions across the world.
But what does any of this have to do with Nigeria? With Africa? With you?
Everything.
The Research Journey
In 2022, Rif Futures Africa initiated a multidisciplinary research project exploring the bridge between human behaviour and physiological and morphological environment. Essentially, how the conditions surrounding a person shape their life choices, work decisions, and behavioural patterns.
The research, conducted through the organisation’s Rif Technotronics and Rif Medics departments, examined how environmental factors, including belief systems, social structures, economic pressures, and inherited ideologies, influence decision-making at both individual and collective levels.
The findings were striking.
Participants exposed to rigid ideological frameworks, whether religious, political, or cultural, demonstrated significantly reduced cognitive flexibility when presented with problems requiring adaptive thinking. This aligns with research led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University, whose brain lesion studies found that religious fundamentalism correlates with reduced cognitive flexibility and openness.
Further analysis revealed that moral reasoning in participants emerged independently of religious instruction. This tallies with Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, which identified six innate moral foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty) that appear in human development before any religious teaching. Infants demonstrate preferences for prosocial behaviours in early development, suggesting morality is biological, not bestowed.
The Rif Futures Africa study also found correlations between environmental instability and susceptibility to absolutist belief systems, a finding consistent with research published in the journal *Religion, Brain and Behavior*, which noted that uncertainty and perceived threat increase reliance on rigid ideological structures as coping mechanisms.
Zooming Out: Nigeria and Africa
When these findings are applied at national and continental scale, a troubling picture emerges.
Nigeria lost over 61,000 lives to violent incidents between June 2006 and May 2014, with religious issues accounting for approximately 11,300 fatalities according to the Nigeria Watch database hosted by the French Institute for Research in Africa. Yet the research reveals something most narratives miss: violence between Islamic groups (60 incidents) actually exceeded Christian-Muslim violence (57 incidents) during this period. Analysis by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) found that attacks specifically targeting civilians based on religious identity account for approximately 5 percent of civilian targeting events.
The division is real. But its roots are more complex than “Christian versus Muslim.”
Colonial powers, as documented in research published in MDPI Religions, “re-worlded and redrew the religious cartography of Africa in accordance with their sectarian traditions.” The British “Southern Policy” in Sudan institutionalised the Muslim North versus Christian South divide. In the Central African Republic, French colonialism positioned Muslims as perpetual outsiders, a status that exploded into violence in 2013 when, according to the UN Commission of Inquiry, 99 percent of Bangui’s Muslim population fled.
These are not theological conflicts. They are inherited structural fractures, dressed in religious clothing.
And they are holding us back.
Research by Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College found that Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, enjoy among the lowest violent crime rates and levels of corruption globally. This does not mean religion is inherently destructive. It means that when religion becomes the primary lens through which societies organise identity, allocate resources, and determine belonging, it can entrench division rather than transcend it.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher, argues for “rooted cosmopolitanism”: the recognition that all humans are fellow citizens of the world with moral obligations extending beyond tribal ties, while still respecting legitimate diversity. Peter Singer’s concept of the “expanding circle” traces how humanity has progressively extended moral concern beyond family, tribe, and nation through reasoned argument.
The question is whether Africa will continue inheriting frameworks that divide, or develop frameworks that unite.
The RIF Moment: An Innovation Frontier
Rif Futures Africa believes the next great human breakthrough may not be technological. It may be conceptual.
Building on three years of research data, the organisation is developing an innovation frontier that challenges contemporary concepts about faith, belief, religion, and human development. This is not about destroying spirituality. It is about liberating human connection from the constraints of inherited conflicts.
The initiative explores three core pillars:
Universal Values: Ethics and morality grounded in shared humanity, not sectarian boundaries
Shared Humanity: Building connection and community without requiring agreement on metaphysical claims
Conscious Evolution: Transcending the limitations that have held human progress hostage for millennia
What if the next great human breakthrough is not a new technology, but a new way of understanding our place in the universe, one that unites rather than divides?
This is frontier territory. The questions are uncomfortable. The implications are vast.
But someone has to ask them.
RIF Africa R&D Team
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