Why does Religion exist?

This question has perplexed me for some time. I understand why individuals have religious feelings and beliefs, various though they are, but why does the concept of religion exist? I’m not thinking of any particular religion or belief system here, after all many forms of religious worship have existed from the present back to well before any historical records began. Indeed archaeologists and anthropologists have pointed to the apparently religious burials of our near relative Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis which indicated a belief in an afterlife.

Some kind of religious observance has probably been going on then for approximately 2 million years and has covered every part of the globe. Why? What is it about the human condition that leads (seemingly inevitably) to a religious response? It would need to be something universal, free of historical, geographical or cultural reference and yet be something uniquely human – as it seems evident that no other creature on Earth practices religion. So, what do we all have in common?

We are all human so we all have universal experiences - birth, growth, death and much besides. But I don’t think that’s enough to explain why so many people have believed in external supernatural forces, gods, demons and versions of an afterlife. I think the thing we all have in common, that is central to who we are and how we think of our place in the universe is that we are all self-aware. We are not only alive, but we know we are alive. We know we exist. That makes us different from the majority of other life forms on the planet. I hesitate to say that we alone have this faculty but I do think it is one of our defining traits.

So why is being self aware so important and how does it lead to religion? Self awareness probably emerged sometime over the last 2 million years as a result of the increasing complexity of the brain. It probably wasn’t like a simple on/off switch but was more likely linked to brain complexity. The more complex the brain, the more self aware the ‘owner’ of that brain was – until at some point in prehistory we, as a species, became aware all of the time. I think that any self-aware being will inevitably ask itself two fundamental questions: Why am I/We here and What happens when I die. Because consciousness feels essentially different from its alternative it is hardly surprising that a self aware being would consider itself ‘special’ and unique, maybe even blessed or chosen. But with this gift comes fear. Fear of the end of consciousness, the end of self-awareness - death in other words.

Up until comparatively recently humans had an intimate knowledge of death and reasonably considered it a central mystery in their lives and I think that this is the crux of the matter. We have a feeling that we are special because of our apparent uniqueness in the animal world. At the same time we live in a world where death is the great leveller and I’m guessing that it wasn’t long before the early philosophers decided that death cannot be the end of things because we are so special. There must be, they had to decide, an existence after death. After all, how can something so special as the only self-aware being on the planet simply cease to be after a few short years as if it had never existed? It just doesn’t make any sense. At that moment religion was born. We are self-aware which makes us special. So special that death cannot be the end of things. The detailed mechanisms would have come later; the idea of the soul (after all bodies decay), the idea of a separate realm that the departed enter (later elaborated to a bad place and a good place with a judge who decides) – and so on. But the nub, the crux, the seed of it all was fear. Fear of death, the death of consciousness.

It follows that non self-aware creatures shouldn’t have religions and this certainly seems to be true (or at least as far as we can tell). Does it also follow that a self-aware creature who was completely unafraid of death would also be without religion? It’s certainly an interesting question.