Tell it to the Red Sox Fans

The Guardian has an article exploring some theories about the origins of faith and religion:

As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist turned psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history. Others maintain that religious belief is too modern to have made any difference.

"What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer.