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Seriously?  Unpack that a little.  Religion is all about what people think – it has no grounding in physical reality.

Without getting into a thesis, religion comes from basic animal instincts, like not wanting to die. We can see our more intelligent animals cousins recognizing loss and mourning it. In us, this has grown into wanting to know what causes life to return in the spring (with variations on that in the equatorial regions).

The “want it to be” part comes when someone decides they know the answers and starts bothering everyone with their theories and manipulating the questions and worries that they know everyone has but has trouble expressing or are too busy finding their next meal to worry about it.

For example, we can see cause and effect and we can become a cause, but we can’t cause our loved ones to live on past their time, so some people start obsessing about some kind of ultimate cause. There’s no rational reason to believe there is one, other than the logic problem of there should be one. On top of that, the obsession wants to have control of that cause, or least ask it for a favor now and then. So we end up arguing about giving this ultimate cause the right name and burning the correct meat for it, instead of understanding the obsession itself.

Replacing the illogical obsession with science doesn’t address the psychology. The desire to know more is always there and wanting to skip over the hard math is human nature. Hoping for a wonder drug to be discovered when your spouse has cancer is not that different from hoping for an angel to appear.