While I'm at it, here's my own pet theory of religion (which I will here define loosely as the belief that the world has a narrative structure and a "personality" to it). Kindly note that I pulled this theory entirely out of my ass.
People believe that the world has a narrative structure and a "personality" to it because that is how they experience the world. People experience nature as being centered around them, as having meaning beyond the simple chain of "x then y then z," and as having intention. Anybody who has ever experienced, for insance, the world as being out to get them has felt this. (I am going to further pull theories out of my ass and speculate that this is because the part of the brain that deals with social interaction is not neatly divided off from the part of the brain that deals with logical cognition.)
There is no need to explain such beliefs as some kind of proto-science or science-substitute (as the Gray article points out), because that is not their origin. Rather, the idea that the world has no narrative structure and no "personality" to it is the result of a long process of abstraction from lived experience, in the process of which you determine that the experience of meaning and intention in nature is an illusion.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Well, we don't really know that religion is purely a
> social construction. It could be biological, a
> social
> construction, even (gasp) true, some combination of
> the three, or something else.
>
> That religion broadly defined is a human
> near-universal, like language, suggests it is not
> merely a contingent social construction.
>