Can we call this the social cohesion explanation for religion? Nicholas Wade wrote The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, which primarily invokes the social cohesion reason for the evolution of religion. This is probably the most popular theory for the persistence of religion trailed closely by answering the existential mysteries: the purpose of life, what happens after we die, a turtle holds the world on its back to partly explain the cosmos.
Primatologist Frans de Waal wrote several books including Primates and Philosophers and the The Bonobo and the Atheist. In all these books, Frans shows how animals have the same emotional mechanisms as humans such as sense of justice, empathy and cooperation, the very features that comprise morality. Others like Patricia Churchland say the same thing, which is better expressed as, humans acquired their morality from their animal predecessors. This begs the question, if we inherited our cooperative principles from our primate forbears, why did we need religion for social cohesion?
Joshua Hehe, a regular contributor on Medium, says religion got rolling about 85,000 years ago. That means that for roughly 99% of the existence of religion, it has been in tribal hunter-gatherer societies. The disposition of religion in modern times is certainly interesting, but it has no bearing on how and why religion evolved in the first place. You are correct to look at it as an issue of survival and reproductive success, unlike the byproduct theorists who see religion as an accidental side-effect. But the reason this enormous part of the human experience continues to be unsettled and controversial is because people are stuck with inadequate interpretations. It’s going to take new thinking outside the box to resolve this.
