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On the Origin of Religion
On the Origin of Religion
To Charles Darwin, the origin of religious belief was no mystery. “As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
But our propensity to believe in unseen deities has long puzzled Darwin’s scientific descendants. Every human society has had
its gods, whether worshipped from Gothic cathedrals or Mayan pyramids. In all cultures, humans pour resources into elaborate religious buildings and rituals, with no obvious boost to survival and reproduction. So how and when did religion arise?
