cultural-identity, psychology, anthropologyAcross different cultures and through history people seem to develop religion. Is it because we are predisposed to do this and if so what is it’s origin?
Yes.
There's a good article on 'magical thinking' on wikipedia. Magical Thinking It has been shown in several studies that by the age of about 18 months children begin to develop invisible friends and other forms of magical and imaginative thinking. Their answers to questions about the way things work are often magical in nature.
This is a normal and formative stage in human development. Without explicit training in how to think outside the confines of magical thinking, it is only the exceptional person that does so. Even with explicit training in cognition and reasoning, most human being fall back on their beliefs instead of rationality. Here's a link to a Boston Globe article on the way people prefer belief to reasoning: Backfiring Beliefs
Theism is easy. It's a natural outgrowth of childhood magical thinking, and it allows you to rely on belief instead of that pesky reasoning.
I think you will enjoy the artice “What use is Religion?” by Dawkins. Part 1, Part 2
In short his idea is that religiousness may flourish parasitically on useful genetic traits.
A new entry in the field of Evolutionary Psychology is the book Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering. It evaluates theological and moral developments as an adaptive impulse. His thesis centers around these processes as what he calls an 'adaptive illusion' that stems from the human impetus to cast agency (human theory of mind) upon all sorts of things, starting with other humans and extending to inanimate objects and the universe at large.
Here is a link to a critical (and consequentialist) review of the book. A summation from the review of the central holding:
Human beings feel that things happen for a reason, that their lives and their triumphs, failures, and tragedies matter in some larger sense; and their theory of mind allows them to trace this sense of cosmic meaningfulness to the presence of a divine agent that watches over and cares for them—even in the absence of any scientifically verifiable evidence of its existence.
The point about certain memes flourishing in particularly ‘receptive’ individuals is important here. I don’t think its a ‘predisposition’ so much as we have the thoughts, feelings, beliefs we ‘deserve’ given our level of education, background, and intellect.
All of desire/faith/belief involves training; the question why the training works so well on some and not on others cant entirely be reduced to a conscious decision. I also don’t think its a simple matter of straightforward ‘predisposition’ towards or away from theism.
In fact, the investment of our rational order of ‘interests’, is often directly in conflict with the ‘irrational’ order of investments of desire. So even if we were ‘intellectually’ predisposed towards critical thinking, skepticism, still our basic desiring-matrix might yet be ‘infected’ by a religious mania.
At any rate, this is one of the reasons i think it is important to be an empiricist. Clear thinking is not the same as correct thinking.
You mention cultures, but then ask about something more intrinsic, a predisposition. I don’t think you can mix the two. The Dawkins article referenced makes a pretty good attempt at it though (note that he ends with “if I am right”).
A big topic of religion today is indoctrination. We know how children have religion forced on them and have many stories of the difficulties young adults have dealing with the inevitable questions, once they get beyond parental control. We also have plenty of history of death penalties for non-belief. If we were predisposed, why would we need that?
To answer the predisposition question, I think you need to go back to pre-history and evolutionary biology. These are pretty difficult topics that are in their infancy. Mythology can also provide some insight because it seems they were trying to relate something about what it is to be human, not just trying create a dogma. Unfortunately, we have very little evidence about how the average person related to these early forms of religion, so I don’t know how we will ever come to understand it.
See the Wikipedia article Evolutionary psychology of religion. This describes how Evolutionary psychology of religion (based on the hypothesis that religious belief can be explained by the evolution of the human brain) seeks to understand how the cognitive processes, in this case religion, might serve the survival and reproductive functions.
Three books covering this are Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer, In Gods We Trust by Scott Atran and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett
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