Evolutionary Theories of Religion

[rainmac]

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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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.

Well, rainmac . . . I'm sorry you're disappointed in simplistic responses, because I know mine was.  I'm not stupid, I have multiple degrees, but they are not in the Sciences (or Math, or Philosophy, etc.).  I understand that my knowledge of evolutionary principles is rudimentary at best.  One good thing I find in the folks here is that we are genuinely curious, generally open-minded, and actively pursuing further education.  I do think the opinion put forth by Redbeard, Clueless, and myself, while not stellar examples of evolutionary principles, has some merit though. Humans developed sufficient intelligence to question their own existence: "who made us"?  The awesome powers of nature that they could not understand must have had a "who" behind them.  Stories about these beings began to be told.  --  A lot of preachers tell us that our brains are hard-wired for belief.

Beyond that, it's clear that I would need to do some heavy studying in order to give you the kind of discourse you seem to be looking for.  I'll bow out now.  If you would like to point me to some good sources to study, I would appreciate it.

I'm a big fan of Cosmides and Tooby, directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara. They have a lot of content online, but their articles can be quite dense. Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer is a good place to start. It has a bibliography at the bottom pointing to many more resources. And, of course, you can always pick up a book about basic evolution at the library if necessary. The nuances inherent in evolutionary psychology are critical to understanding the human animal and even moreso for religion.

While I don't think you're wrong about religion serving as a reaction to or being the result of human higher-order cognition, it helps to couch it in terms of evolutionary science rather than just being a choice as if someone just decided to invent this thing called religion AND everybody just happened to be receptive to it.