Whats the Use of Religion?
if(zs>0){zSB(3,3)}else{gEI(“spacer”).style.display=’none’;gEI(“sidebar”).style.display=’none’} There have been quite a few attempts to explain why religion exists and why it is able to persist. In recent decades there has been more focus on biological explanations and Richard Dawkins has argued that religion is an evolutionary error in that it’s a bad consequence of necessary and otherwise good adaptations. This is how evolution works: adapting old structures for new uses and, in the process, sometimes producing side-effects which may provide even more benefits or which might provide new disadvantages. Mahalanobis explains: Religious behaviour may be a misfiring…an unfortunate manifestation of an underlying psychological propensity that in other circumstances was once useful. …More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience n
