Evolutionary Theories of Religion

[rainmac]

I'm surprised that a #3 isn't included that mentions phenomena like pareidolia, apophenia and agency-detection coupled with the human capacity for abstract thinking.  To me, that seems the most convincing reasons humans might have evolved a tendency for superstitious/religious thought.  From this fairly reasonable starting point (to me at least), you can get to #2, and then to #1.

I don't see #1 being a stand-alone explanation for why humans evolved religiosity without some kind of agency-detection system already being in place, and an agency-detection system would be the thing that builds the religious framework that is then used to explain the existential questions being asked, and, as the OP states, #2 can be achieved by so many other successful methods that religiosity doesn't seem wholly sufficient as an explanation.

Is human agency detection different from other mammals' agency detection? Why is it that humans' agency detection builds the religious framework?

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The most popular theories for why humans have religion are:
1. To answer the existential mysteries--Why do we die? What is our purpose in life? How did the zebra get its stripes, etc...
2. To increase social cohesion in tribes/groups

My question is, at least for #2, there are 1,000s of animals species that live in social groups and have perfectly adequate social cohesion mechanisms such as territoriality, dominance hierarchy, grooming, etc. Why would humans need religion to improve their social relationships when there are already abundant mechanisms and successful social species? For those of you who might be familiar with some of the theory of religion writers--Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, Dennett, Matt Rossano, and others--I haven't seen anybody ask this question. Is this a valid question? Is this a valid question for #1? 

Number two is only a popular theory in modern society because religious people think meeting in church is the way to socialize.  They are stupid retarded.

The origin of religion is simple enough; man had no idea from whence he had come and he looked toward simplistic answers due to his limited resources.  It was natural to look at the stars and imagine that gods lived up there who created them.

There's a lot of this religion is natural stuff like Pascal Boyer's The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, but whenever anybody says religion is natural, it gets my hackles up. Everything is natural, but everything still needs explanations. When people label something as natural, it means they don't know how to explain it. In the closed world of physics, everything has a cause--or probability in the quantum world--even if we don't fully understand what that is.

It's fun to bash the irrational believers, but after spending time in an atheist group, I find that atheists can be as irrational and dogmatic as any religious fanatic. And most atheists grasp of evolutionary principles is disappointing as well.