The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

by Sheldon Solomon

Myths provide the narrative justification for rituals and, embellished by art, form religion, which serves to regulate all aspects of social behavior. Religions delineate how we should interact with and treat each other by providing a purposeful, moral conception of a life in which individuals’ souls can exist beyond their physical death. And religion gave our ancestors—as it gives us—a sense of community and shared reality, a worldview, without which coordinated and cooperative activities in large groups of humans would be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Sociologist Emile Durkheim and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that the only reason religion originated and flourished was that it fostered social cohesion and coordination. Summarizing this view, science writer Nicholas Wade asserts that “religious behavior evolved for a single reason: to further the survival of human societies.” While religions provided such benefits by shoring up extant social structures and interpersonal bonds, we believe it was their psychological appeal that enabled them to serve as social glue in the first place. In short, these spiritual belief systems thrived because they quell existential terror (and we will present evidence in support of this claim in the next chapter).