There are plenty of theories as to how and why religion might have evolved, Richard Dawkins summarises a few in The God Delusion, but there are more detailed expositions elsewhere.
Off course, the claim of the religious in that pre-“civilisation” man’s habit of deifying rocks, the sea, the thunder or whatever is “proof” of the immanence of religion within the human condition, ergo, proving religion itself. Ditto human traits like generosity, kindness, tendency to cooperation and community and so on. All down to the deity, y’know. Otherwise it’s all “movement of atoms”.
Altruistic behaviour is a RESULT of natural selection. It's what Richard Dawkins wrote his first book about in 1976, and has been detailed in masses of studies ever since. Altruism is a powerful tool for survival among social mammals like ourselves. There is a powerful selection pressure that promotes it.
On the back of our evolved social altruism we get civilization, agriculture, science, medicine, art and culture. The true weakness is selfishness, self-centredness and isolation, because that shuts an individual off from the vastly greater resources of shared effort.
Many other creatures have developed altruism. It’s not universal, because not all animals have evolved in social communities. Sharks have evolved as lone hunters in the main. Altruism is not a very good survival strategy when you're configured to be a lone hunter. But for intelligent, social, group-living creatures like primates it's absolutely vital.
Nothing to do with magic sky wizards who stood by for something like 150,000 years while humans were dying of tooth decay by 20 and cowering terrified from the thunder and the earthquakes (must be the gods). And no amazing coincidence that this deification of natural phenomena transferred to something more formal on the advent of agriculture and civilisation as we might know it.
I’m not sure Darwin ever said “survival of the fittest” but either way he wasn’t talking about a “nasty, brutish and short Hobbesian free for all.
If you’d ever read a book that dealt in reason and logic you might already have gathered that.[/QUOTE]
If you had read the OP you would realise we are talking about how the universe began
oh and Darwin first used Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for natural selection in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869