18 Religion’s innate origins and evolutionary background Scott Atran 1 Introduction This chapter envisions religion, in general, and awareness of the supernatural, in particular, as a converging by-product of several cognitive and emotional mechanisms that evolved under natural selection for mundane adaptive tasks (Atran, 2002). As human beings routinely interact they naturally tend to exploit these by-products to solve inescapable, existential problems that have no apparent worldly solution, such as the inevitability of death and the ever-present threat of deception by others. Religion involves costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterintuitive world of supernatural agents that master such existential anxieties (Atran and Norenzayan, 2004). The greater one’s display of costly commitment to that factually absurd world–as in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son for nothing palpable save faith in a ‘voice’ demanding the killing–the greater society’s trust in that person’s ability and will to help out others with their inescapable problems (Kierkegaard, 1843/1955). 1 This framework for understanding religion is informed not just by my reading of our culture’s religious history, but by cross-cultural experiments with colleagues and ethnographic sojourns among Lowland Maya (Mesoamerica), Druze mountaineers (Middle East), Pashtun nomads (Central Asia), Tamil Hindu farmers (South India), and Ladakhi Buddhist tanshumants (Himalaya). 1 The outlines of the factually preposterous world a person is committed to must be shared by a significant part of society, lest the person be considered a deviant psychopath or sociopath (e.g. child abuser, would-be murderer).