Theories of Taylor, Muller and Schmidt on the Origin of Religion

A number of 19th-century scholarly studies about religion were concerned with understanding the origin of religion and concerned with the development of religious practices, which paralleled a similar concern in the biological sciences with the origin of life and with evolutionary change. Later, more anthropological studies would lose interest in the question of origins and become more concerned with social aspects of religion, or with the symbolic nature of religious systems. The question of the origins of religion is complicated by the distinction between asking what religion was like for the ...