Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise — people bound by new institutions that provide the social benefits of religion without belief in a traditional deity?

I raise these questions after reading my colleague Nicholas Wade’s fascinating new book, “The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures,” in which he argues that people have a genetically based urge to worship, engraved by natural selection in the mind’s neural circuits because of the tremendous advantage religion conferred on early societies. (You can read a summary of the argument in his Week in Review article.)

If there is a religious instinct, how do we make sense of the declining church attendance in western Europe? As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the ..
NY Times
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Changes in atmospheric pressure may help to keep Earth habitable.NASA

Nitrogen now stored in the planetary crust and mantle may have prevented the early Earth from freezing, scientists suggest. The study lends weight to the idea that on geological timescales atmospheric pressure helps to regulate climate and habitability of Earth-like planets.

Nature
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