Opinion: Where Does Religion Come From?

What’s missing from this account, though, is an explanation of how you get from the desire for meaning or the fear of death to the specific content of religious belief — the content that’s obviously quite important to a lot of people, insofar as its absence in Hirsi Ali’s account frustrated many of her readers. Even if belief in invisible watchers has its social uses, if such beings don’t exist, it’s a pretty odd thing that societies the world over have converged on the belief that we share the cosmos with them. To say nothing of the specific doctrines and miraculous claims associated with that belief: For instance, if Christianity disappeared from everyone’s memory tomorrow, it would be odd indeed for a modern Western thinker seeking meaning amid disillusionment to declare, “What we need here is the doctrine of the Trinity and a resurrected messiah with some angels at the tomb.”