I positively feel fortunate that the enigma of religion is unfolding during my life time. Although my knowledge in this vast space is highly limited, I am feeling more and more comfortable with my little theory that organized religion was bred by the need to satisfy man's biological need for religiosity and continuously strengthened by its effectiveness during the group selection process.

The article below is difficult to excerpt since it is long and contains many experiments and hypotheses. I invite you to take a few minutes and go through the original article to see for yourself. My previous post on religion can be found here.



Where angels no longer fear to tread
Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition


BY the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum... [which] will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.