I have just finished Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. Wade has worked for the NY Times as editorial writer as well as Nature and Science magazines. This book is a fairly short (284pgs) work.
Wade’s basic premise is that humans have evolved a biological faith instinct that promoted group cohesion. IMO this may or may not be true, that is up to the biologists to determine.
To me the basic importance of the book is that Wade demonstrates how religious beliefs and organization of society would give particular groups of humans a survival edge through greater social solidarity.
Starting with such observations as:
“Religion creates circles of trust whose members may support one another in calamity or find hosts and trading partners in distant cities.”
“Religion, above all, embodies the moral rules that members of a community observe toward one another. It thus sustains the quality of the social fabric, and did so alone in early societies that had not developed civil authorities. It binds people together for collective action, through public rituals that evoke emotional commitment to a common cause.”
and concluding with such observations as:
“The American Creed,” in short, is Protestantism without God, the secular credo of the “ nation with the soul of a church” Huntington wrote.”
“Religion express a society’s collective wisdom, past and present as to how its members should best behave in order to enhance the societies survival.”
“We are not just the product of a blind and random process but something more, a creature shaped for good or ill by the collective choices of all our ancestors for thousands of generations.”
And lastly: “Secularism is on the march because religions, within the framework of their sacred narratives, are losing their hold on people’s belief. They endure more because people want to believe in something than through the plausibility of their historical assertions.”
There is a lot of interesting material in between. If you are interested in how society works and the influence religion has within and upon it this is a book worth reading.