javeca wrote:

My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

D'Souza, D. (2006, October 22). God knows why faith is thriving. Retrieved March 6, 2010, from San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi...LRRPN1.DTL#ixzz0hTJPE8Kh


I was discussing this with Lord Wigglesworth, my cat. You will forgive his somewhat limited perspective, he takes a more catocentric view of the universe than we do. 

     He said religion has no place in his thoughts, nor in the thoughts of any of the cats at the local dump. He said he has not noticed any of the mice he has ever tortured praying aloud to any god either. He then went on to say that from the point of view of a cat, religion is a relatively recent and uniquely human quirk, an oddity affecting a subset of a minute fraction of all terrestrial life. Before going on to lick himself, he said we were just a little squeak in the stream of time, and not to let new and silly human ideas obscure the fact that cats have got it all figured out.


Point being that when you see that the floppy appendage of religion is peculiar to a subgroup of a single species, you look for darwinian reasons explaining why they have it, not why the others don’t.