The model of the world reproduced by a community defines that community in relation to others and provides a commonality — of construals, values and emphases — that unites and binds members of a community into an integrated social system. The inclusion of more powerful personifications of Nature in that social system amplifies the force of the model that binds individuals together.[1] This amplification extends greater authority to the social contracts — rights and responsibilities — that provide social stability and evolve as the moral code of the community, later insitutionalised as legal and justice systems, not least because the moral code can be modelled as meanings expressed by personified higher powers. It thus naturalises — and provides authoritative justification for — the means of maintaining social organisation, as well as the organisational type of the social system. The biological value of this process is the increased probability of social stability, and through this, increased probability of individual survival.
Footnote:
[1] It also provides a degree of certainty in the model, and so confidence.