[2][3][4][5] Support for such a position being found in the fact that (as Talcott Parsons put it) "there is no known human society without something which modern social scientists would classify as religion".
[6] Archaeologists have established the existence of burial rituals among Neanderthals some 50,000 years ago:[7] their appearance has sometimes been taken as evidence of the human capacity to transform instinct, rather than to be driven by it.
[8] Sigmund Freud saw human weakness and helplessness as a fundamental force behind the establishment of religion,[9] a view which might seem to draw support from the Inglehart–Welzel thesis that links the insecurities of traditional economies to a search for spiritual certainty, the affluence of modernization to a declining stress on religion.
[11] While he recognized in man a genetic predisposition to order experience in mythological, religious or symbolic terms,[12] Jung reserved judgement as to what bearing this had for the truth-value of religion.
[13] He never ceased however to stress the important challenge all such factors presented to any shallowly rationalistic world-view.