Living in Tough Environments Makes People More Prone to Belief in God

Human societies have evolved, over the course of millenia, thousands of forms of spiritual beliefs. Some worship nature; others a single all-powerful deity. For years, anthropologists, evolutionary ecologists and other scientists have puzzled over why these beliefs arose when and where they did, the Washington Post writes; recent research has shown that religious belief gives people an edge on survival—especially if they believe in moralizing deities who impose laws on human behavior. According to a new paper, however, there's likely more to the story than this. The authors of the new study agree that religion rose out of necessity, but they point out that the degree of necessity was not evenly distributed across the planet. Instead, people living in harsher places—where the rain came only occasionally, where winters were cold, dark and long, where natural disasters swept through—were more prone to adopt religion, the authors found.