In a similar way to the assumptions of religion, when we talk about awe and beauty we are speaking of something beyond easy description.

For what place do things like awe and wonder have in the listings of clinical characteristics?

And why should simple time, space, and distance comparisons stir some sort of longing inside of us?

On the opposite end, how can such simple and mundane things with loved ones evoke the same?

And why do we care?

This, again, seems like an issue that is significant because it is always “by a person or about a person.”

They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)

So, where did religion come from?

I suppose we can hypothesize what people thought and felt before records were kept, but this question is deeper than that.

The jump from there to the theology we have today is not obvious.

This is especially true in regard to the issue of pain.

For in what way can the concepts of goodness and virtue metaphysically follow out of suffering and void?

Maybe something revealed? Or something in our hearts all-along?

Living a life that ignores this is, shall we say, taking a lot for granted.

If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)