There was an interesting article on this question (as applied to God, rather than religion) in last week's Guardian over here:
Why do we believe in God? | Religion | The Guardian
Written by Professor Robert Winston, who presents Science shows on the BBC.
Basically, the article provides 3 potential reasons (if we ignore the "people happen to believe in God because he happens to exist" reason).
1. Religion (or God) is a memeplex that has taken host in the brains of individuals, much like a virus. One can extend the analogy by talking about Lamarckian processes, competition for resources in Belief-O-Space etc. After all, just because something happens to exist, it does not necessarily imply that it confers some survival advantage, for
us. Religions may simply exist because they provide survival advantage for
themselves. Dawkins is a big advocate of this approach as is Susan Blakemore.
Center for the Study of Complex Systems | U-M LSA
There's a lot that makes sense to me in this approach.
2. Some anthropologists do take the view that religion had to confer some survival advantage to humans and see religion as existing primarily as a comforting mechanism, which would reduce stress and thus enable individuals to act more effectively. I guess this could be poorly phrased as "its nice to have a sky daddy", but I'm not even going to go there
3 there are also social benefits to belonging in a particular (non-familial) club, where individuals would have able to help and defend one another. From the Guardian article:
The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation.
I guess another potential reason (not in the article) for the existence of religion is as a control mechanism for tyrannical leaders (or witchdoctors) to subjugate people with, but I'd imagine that religion came before the existence of those claiming a divine right to lead. Maybe not, though.
IMO, why religion existed at all is primarily through reasons 2 & 3. Why it survives to this day is probably 1 & 4.
PE
This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 10-17-2005 04:43 AM