I love religion!

[lukec]

See, even saying ‘some sort of animism’ requires an initial idea that there are souls in other things, and an idea of what a soul is. It’s also important to remember that our ancestors weren’t necessarily backwards cavemen terrified of the world. No one woke up one day and said, “right, that deer over there has a soul.” I’m not disagreeing with you here, merely emphasising that it probably was a little more complex. Having said that, humans are also as superstitious as they used to be, so you are right that these ideas probably started that way and developed.

No, they probably weren't communicating with grunts if that's what you mean. But primitive people were exactly that. There is a tribe in South America right now whose members, as of last year, didn't have a concept of "the future," so I find it somewhat hard to ascribe that much sophistication to our ancestors.

There’s a couple of things that arise here; one being that most humans follow the pack, but we are the only species to also display genius. The trigger here could be the idea that one person in the tribe has an insight that he/she explains as a deity, then the others go along with the idea. (You could argue this is how Islam started out.)

Now, what would that experience be? If it’s biological, as I suspect it might be, then we have a cause. What came first, the numinous experience or the concept of deity? If people are having a certain experience, then they may explain it in the way that they can.

The second issue is one that mainstream thought seems to avoid, and that’s drugs. A shaman doesn’t come from nowhere. Naturally growing hallucinogens can cause experiences which can be regarded as religious in nature, but how would they be described before the concept of religion? I’m not convinced this could not have been the cause of some of the ideas, and then the others followed the idea, even though they had not necessarily had the same experience.

Makes perfect sense. Shamanistic rituals often do involve psychotropics. I don't know if it's strictly necessary for a belief to form, but definitely I'd think some of the early "religious" experiences were drug related. That said, humans have such a strong tendency to anthropomorphize that I think it could easily have happened in day to day experience (Pocahontas quote: The rainstorm and the river are my brothers, The heron and the otter are my friends, And we are all connected to each other, In a circle, in a hoop that never ends ). In fact it was probably both- I think that religious or supernatural concepts were developed multiple times around the world.

It’s really difficult to explain stuff like that plus avoid the semantic trap of inferring genes are thinking and have a plan! You did well. The problem is that it still infers a plan of some sort. I’m not sure you can say it’s a strategy as such, more just the way things have panned out. Natural selection isn’t a strategy, it’s just the result of how things are.

100% agreed- it's just easier to talk in metaphor- when I can say strategy instead of "set of properties of a certain allele which lead to the same allele becoming more numerous in the gene pool after successive generations" my head hurts less.

On a slightly off tangent note, we do see that happening. Have you heard of Harun Yahya? He’s a famous Muslim creationist who apparently just blindly lies about evolution to get people to believe him. I’ve not read his stuff, but I’ve talked with Muslims who use his arguments, and they are just so flawed it’s amazing. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of religious ideas such as hell are not necessarily believed in by some people who espouse the ideas.

Never heard of him, but it surprises me very little. Hell is a great religious motivator, and throughout history it's probably caused a "hell" of a lot of conversions.

I’ve not read it yet, but I might do on your recommendation. It’s only Dawkins’ literalist take on religion that bugs me, the stuff on biology he does is great from what I’ve seen and heard.

Yeah, it's one of his first books, about 30 years old, so there's not a lot of harping on about god or anything. It's just very well written and easy to understand- and actually it's the book which really solidified exactly how simply evolution works when you look at the gene as the active participant in natural selection, rather than the individual, group, or species. Sometimes I get really awed by the beauty in the simplicity, and it's because of this book.