There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion
is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human
history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that
drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of
thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and
has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct
of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of
organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up
with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind).
These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine
purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be
explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets,
complexity of life, etc. The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.
Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired"
into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some variants of a specific gene, the VMAT2 gene, predispose to spirituality.
Another view is based on the concept of the triune brain: the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex, proposed by Paul D. MacLean.
Collective religious belief draws upon the emotions of love, fear, and
gregariousness and is deeply embedded in the limbic system through
sociobiological conditioning and social sanction. Individual religious
belief utilizes reason based in the neocortex and often varies from
collective religion. The limbic system is much older in evolutionary
terms than the neocortex and is, therefore, stronger than it much in the
same way as the reptilian is stronger than both the limbic system and
the neocortex. Reason is pre-empted by emotional drives. The religious
feeling in a congregation is emotionally different from individual
spirituality even though the congregation is composed of individuals.
Belonging to a collective religion is culturally more important than
individual spirituality though the two often go hand in hand. This is
one of the reasons why religious debates are likely to be inconclusive.
Yet another view is that the behaviour of people who participate in a
religion makes them feel better and this improves their fitness, so
that there is a genetic selection in favor of people who are willing to
believe in religion. Specifically, rituals, beliefs, and the social
contact typical of religious groups may serve to calm the mind (for
example by reducing ambiguity and the uncertainty due to complexity) and
allow it to function better when under stress.
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