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WHAT IS RELIGION, AND WHAT IS ITS ORIGIN?
But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Religion may actually be a behavioural adaptation. Religious beliefs are hypotheses that try to explain things people can’t understand or figure out, for lack of information or evidence, “attempts of the human mind to impose some kind of order on the chaos of existence” (Anthony Storr).
No credible evidence exists that any species, including Homo sapiens, has a higher purpose beyond survival and procreation—i.e., sending genes into the next generation. If, as biological evidence suggests, religious faith is a biological adaptation, the selective pressure that created it has some obvious functions. Religious faith...