Essay on the Aleatory Element Theory of Religion – Sumner and Keller in their book “The Science of Society” have stated that the ever present element of chance or what they call “The aleatory element” has been the main factor for the rise of religion.
According to them, the primitive man is very much perturbed about the problem of bad luck. He is always concerned with the question of avoiding the misfortunes and securing good luck.
In his attempts to find out an explanation for the occurrence of fortunes and misfortunes, the primitive man has pictured this ‘aleatory element’ as being controlled and manipulated by supernatural forces.
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Hence the primitive focuses his attention on winning the favours of such forces so that he gets only fortunes and not misfortunes. He is also very much bothered to avoid bad luck. Hence, Sumner and Keller have argued that human beings at all times attempted to devise means of insuring themselves against misfortune.
They thus stressed the fact that “religion arose in response to a definite need-adjustment to the supernatural or imaginary environment” which has the capacity of causing fortunes or misfortunes.