The cause of Faith is....wait for it.....Evolution. Someone check and see if Pat Robertson's head exploded.

It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages. Many anthropologists and social theorists do indeed take the view that religion emerged out of a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment - explaining misfortune or illness, for example, as the consequences of an angry God, or reassuring us that we live on after death. Rituals would have given us a comforting, albeit illusory, sense that we can control what is in fact ultimately beyond our control - the weather, illness, attacks by predators or other human groups.

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a "useful" genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by "natural selection": adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes.

I live for this stuff! I have to admit I have spent more then a reasonable amount of time pondering why it is that some people are so certain that there is a God and that they have chosen the proper method of worhip, and why others are completely unimpressed by religion as a whole.

I also have wondered why the non-religious seem more aware of the inconsistencies in the many beliefs while the faithful seem to take no notice at all. Well the words that I live by are as follows;

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Plato. Or it could be Socrates, I always get them confused. I know he wore a sheet and sandals.