Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: religion ain't going anywhere. We as a species are hardwired to trust in a power greater than us. We all know that where man has lived on this planet so has religion. Well, where did it come from? Why did it arise?

Religion exists because man will always ponder the eternal riddles. How did the cosmos originate? How long has it been around? Did matter begin with an explosion or by the word of God? Violence, division, and disorder bombard us, but religion asks us to go on believing, not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of kidnappings, and terror, and apathy, and disaster. I speak, by the way, not just of the 'living God' of Christianity, but of all religions, even the ones that exclude miracles or even a God who does them, or indeed anything else.

Religion also gives a voice to the poor, the oppressed, the widows, the unborn, and the orphans of the world. Religion provides the best explanation for why good things happen to bad people, although this is no easy feat. Particularly when watching the evening news. Naturally belief in a divine intelligence requires faith. Yet not everyone chooses to have faith. This is because for our free choice to exist there must always be just enough lack of proof. Otherwise, it would not be free choice. For who of us could do anything but believe if faith was like the periodic table of elements?

For those who choose to have faith, the visible world seems to shout at them that this is not the only reality. The irreligious, on the other hand, find it plausible that we chose the right card out of a deck of billions. This is a very difficult question when we realize scientists have calculated the odds of everything in existence occurring by pure chance is one shot out of ten to the power of ten to the one hundred and twenty-fourth power.

The rift between science and religion grows deeper and deeper. Science is something we depend on all the time. If my child's fever refuses to go away, I must take her to get an X-ray of her chest. But what if the X-ray spots pneumonia? The doctor prescribes an antibiotic too hard to pronounce. Before I know it, I make technology God because of her recovery. Yet can technology really be the answer when a typical science textbook, filled with the knowledge of how to split an atom, contains no chapters on how to teach her morality and how she should treat others?

Science has conquered diseases, broken the genetic code, and even put man on the moon. Yet the language of science comes with no markers as to what is right and wrong.

If religion has let us down, it is only because man is flawed. But science, with promises of efficiency having only bred pollution and chaos, has also failed us. For the life of me I can't understand why we can't build a network of "gas" stations for hydrogen fuel cell cars, though certain particle physicists are still seeking a "theory of everything," where the mystery of the Big Bang can be solved and then easily reduced to a mathematical equation compact enough to carry around in your wallet.

As long as science is mute on the answers to these age-old questions, religion will be with us.

Learn more about this author, Jeffrey Jason Hill.
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