In addition to these psychological aspects, the ritual behaviour seen in collective worship makes us enjoy and want to repeat the experience. Have you ever seen the outline of a person only to realise that it is actually a coat hung on the door? This capacity to attribute human forms and behaviours to non-human things shows we also readily endow non-human entities, such as gods, with the same qualities that we possess and, as such, make it easier to connect with them. Mamma Belle and the kids/ShutterstockĪnother key adaptation that may help religious belief derives from our ability to to anthropomorphise objects. It is easy to see that these strong attachments could transfer to religious deities and their messengers. We continue to rely on these attachments in later life, when falling in love and making friends, and can even form strong attachments to non-human animals and inanimate objects. British psychologist John Bowlby demonstrated this influence of attachments on children’s emotional and social development, and showed how these can suffer when they are threatened through separation or abuse. In doing so we inevitably have stronger attachments to some individuals more than others. We are social creatures who interact and communicate with each other in a co-operative and supportive way. Essentially this hypothesis is that religion is a by-product of a number of cognitive and social adaptations which have been extremely important in human development. Sigmund Freud felt that god was an illusion and worshippers were reverting to the childhood needs of security and forgiveness.Ī more recent psychological explanation is the idea that our evolution has created a “ god-shaped hole” or has given us a metaphorical “ god engine” which can drive us to believe in a deity. Karl Marx, for example, called religion the “ opium of the people”. Why people believe is a question that has plagued great thinkers for many centuries. Only 16% of people worldwide are not religious, but this still equates to approximately 1.2 billion individuals who find it difficult to reconcile the ideas of religion with what they know about the world. The quick and easy answer to why people are religious is that God – in whichever form you believe he/she/they take(s) – is real and people believe because they communicate with it and perceive evidence of its involvement in the world.
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