Is philosophy verboten?

The idea that a belief in God would be advantageous to the survival of or improvement of a species is an interesting one.  I hadn't thought of it before.  so the question is whether or not God actually exists, does belief in God give a survival advantage?

Without jumping to conclusions, I venture that religious belief has no genetic basis (there is no 'God gene' is there?).  However, that is not so important. 

As an analogy, these days our success is driven by technological advances, which again are not genetic, but rather a natural progression in group ability passed on from generation to generation.  In this case though, I think the advantages to the species are unquestionable, at least in the short term.

My personal opinion is that religious belief is a by-product of the reason for human success.  The three main reasons for our success are generally accepted to be: 1. Intelligence; 2. The ability to communicate; 3. The formation of societies.

So my argument goes that at some point in the past, people became intelligent enough to question their own existence, communicate that question, and influence a whole society.  So what we have is a classic argument of cause and effect.

Of course, in those days little was understood about science (scientific fact).  So you would get societies worshipping the Sun, because that made some sense of a world that they otherwise could not explain.  And so on.

It is clearly a general attribute of human society to have belief in something like God, because that seems to have happened in virtually all cases independently of each other (that I know of anyway).  Maybe this in itself answers the initial post in this topic.  My question here is is there any evidence of a human society that didn't believe in God failing to the benefit of one that did.  I actually can't think of a failed society that didn't believe in some sort of god(s), although there were several that no longer exist that did believe.

Final point, there are plenty of other animal species still around and they don't have the capacity to believe in anything.  I would say that religious belief is an unimportant by-product of our becoming intelligent enough to question our own existence.  My opinion at the moment - I may change my mind.  You can have a different opinion whether you believe in God or not.  It is an intereting topic.

"We are hear and it is now.  Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."    --H.L. Mencken

If you look at the author of this thread's post, you'd see that he mentioned evolution and I just posted a little snippet about something I had read recently, at the time, about evolution.

The Joker