Newspapers reported in August that in a drought-stricken area of Nepal, women danced naked in a sacred appeal for rain. A few weeks earlier, villagers in Indonesia burned incense and offered up mounds of rice, fruit and vegetables to keep a rumbling volcano from erupting. In South Dakota, Gov. Mike Rounds declared the last week of July “a week to pray for rain” because of the severe drought across the northern plains.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m all for food, incense, prayer and people dancing naked. But, among the many things these supplications can induce, luring rain from the sky is not one of them. Neither is quieting a volcano that is ready to explode.

Why does faith in such behavior bring expectations, hope or comfort that it will change natural events? Back in 450 B.C., Greek philosophers taught us to use reason to explain natural events such as rain, drought or volcanic eruptions. Essentially, natural events had natural causes. We made good use of that lesson. By invoking reason, we added the movement of the planets, the spread of diseases, the evolution of life on earth and myriad other natural phenomena to the long list of knowledge once ascribed to various demons, gods and spirits. Evolution gave humans the power of reason; with reason we discovered evolution and its gift of reason. There are few circles more poetic or ironic.

Today you’d think that reason alone could satisfy our knowing the natural universe. Not so. Faith persists that divine intervention can alter natural events, such as calming a volcano or bringing rain to a parched state. Faith is most persistent over nature’s ultimate event on earth: evolution. Divine intervention, many people believe, steered either the onset, or direction, or results of the four billion-year history of life on earth, from the origin of bacteria and the extinction of dinosaurs to the appearance of humans. Kenneth Miller, a renowned evolutionary biologist and devout Catholic said as much in his Difficult Dialogues lecture at KU a few weeks ago.

Richard Dawkins, author of “The Selfish Gene” and “The God Delusion,” disagreed in his Difficult Dialogues lecture a week ago. Faith and reason share the same impetus: our need to explain the universe. The tension between them is about power, power granted by the autonomy and utility of the explanation. Reason appeals to us, as it did the free-thinkers in 450 B.C., because it permits us to wield individuality of thought and influence. Explanations rooted in faith, often mediated through a cleric, only grant the power to sing “amen” in unison.

What’s more – and here is the shocker – perhaps faith persists in the face of reason because it too is part of our evolutionary package. Polls show that faith is as pervasive as ever, as if it were hard-wired in the human machine. Some psychologists think such faith in the supernatural is predisposed by our genes, coded as much by nature as nurture.

How could faith have entered the human genetic makeup? Blame our sentience. The price we pay for being the only sentient species on earth is our foreknowledge of death; we know we are mortal. It is the most uncomfortable piece of knowledge we must live with. And it is as uncomfortable today as it was for our ancient near-human relatives thousands and millions of years ago: Homo erectus, Neandertals and early Homo sapiens.

Fear of mortality spawned faith in an afterlife, a psychological adaptation, a comfort, to keep from going mad. It might have provided groups of believers a psychological edge in the competition for mates and resources, survival of the happiest. It is no coincidence, say these psychologists, that faith in the afterlife became the central tenet of every religion. If gods and myths ruled the mysteries of the afterworld, they were also invoked to explain the mysteries of this world, the natural earthly forces manifest in fire, water, air, land and life. Ever since, these supernatural explanations about the functioning of the universe and earth have given way to natural ones.

But, for many, the supernatural explanations persist today as reality, rather than storytelling. As Sam Harris writes in “The End of Faith,” “We, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?”

I don’t know the answer to this question, perhaps because I don’t know what it means to suspend reason on Sunday and return to it on Monday. I know that cosmic evolution brought dark and light space to the universe. Perhaps human evolution soft-wired both faith and reason to keep us sane in our dark and light spaces of the unknowable and the known. Matter and anti-matter are essential for equilibrium in the universe so that it can continue its rhythm and motion. So, too, perhaps the human condition.