The origin of relgion

 When I was a student, introductory courses on the philosophy of religion began with arguments about the existence of God. I always wanted to begin elsewhere, with the question of what religion is — where the religious impulse comes from, and why it’s a feature of most but not all cultures.

Do you know where religion comes from?

Edward B. Tylor, a pioneering cultural anthropologist, thought that religion probably began when primitive humans saw the dead in their dreams. They cooked up explanations of spirits and souls to explain how the dead could be alive in some sense.

Early humans offered a supernatural explanation of a natural phenomenon — dreaming — that they didn’t understand.

I’m not ready to endorse Tylor’s suggestion. But I’m impressed by the attempt to answer a question that a lot of thinkers have dodged — or so it seems to me. The idea was in Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in 1871. It’s been around for more than 150 years.