Battleangel

Somewhat ironic possibility: Evolution.
Guardian has an extract from Robert Winston’s latest book The Story of God. A series by the same name is also currently being put together for the BBC.

Guardian - In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a “useful” genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents’ daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by “natural selection”: adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone with a grasp of the field. But this is of course a more mainstream approach aimed at a broader, non-academic audience. Winston elaborates on what advantages certain types of behavior would have granted in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness) and notes that

[...] religion does not seem to be produced by a specific part of our psychological make-up. Is it more likely, then, that religious ideas are something of an accidental by-product created by other parts of our basic blueprint, by processes deep in the unconscious mind that evolved to help us survive?