Sully highlights a very interesting idea on the origins of religious belief from biologist Lewis Wolpert:[O]nly human primates understand the causal and intentional relations that hold among external entities. Tomasello illustrates this point for non-human primates with the claim that even though they might watch the wind shaking a branch until its fruit falls, they would never shake the branch themselves to obtain the fruit. Some primates are, nevertheless, at the edge of having causal understanding. Once causal belief evolved in relation to tools and language, it was inevitable that people would want to understand the causes of all the events that might affect their lives — such as illness, changes in climate and death itself. Once there was a concept of cause and effect, ignorance was no longer bliss, and this could have led to the development of religious beliefs.This makes a lot of sense to me. So much of the religious belief I see in the world is people searching for some way to create order and meaning in the otherwise chaotic universe. It would make sense that the newly evolving form of human proto-consciousness would erect some kind of ingrained mechanism for the mind to ascribe some kind of higher causality to the seemingly random events happening around it.
One could imagine that a world in which tornados kill people due to insufficient homage to the Gods -- rather than just due to random, unknowable chance -- had to be more satisfying than a world in which stuff just happens. It must be nice to live in a reality in which a person believes he can exert control over chaotic events by appealing to some kind of higher causal power (e.g., tree spirits, God, etc.). After all, a lot of people seem to derive great comfort from the idea that praying to God somehow helps their kid's Little League team win games.
Hopefully we can someday find a way to more effectively suppress this vestige of the early development of our consciousness.
