I’ve been reading an interesting book called “The God Part of the Brain.” It’s written by an author who freely admits that he had a bad acid trip as a young man which sent him on a decade-plus search for the roots of spirituality. His thesis is that human spirituality is an evolved function, much like language, passed through genes. Up to the point that I’m at in the book, he’s made two arguments — one that man, a creature whose only defense is his intelligence, is the only animal who realized his own mortality, thus setting off a kind of existentialist crisis for the species. Second, man, with his acumen with numbers, was the only creature to be able to contemplate notions of infinity which are integral to religion and spirituality. These notions of mortality and infinity were a kind of psychological attack, and in order to weather them, man had to develop his religions.

I’m not entirely sure I buy this, or at least it sounds more like a skeleton of a theory than a fully fleshed out idea, but it’s pretty interesting.