From Our Brains Strive To See Only the Good, Leading Some to God:
Religion used to be ascribed to a wish to escape mortality by invoking an afterlife or to feel less alone in the world. Now, some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer of Washington University, St. Louis, calls in a 2003 paper ‘a predictable by-product of ordinary cognitive function.’One of those functions is the ability to imagine what Prof. Boyer calls ‘nonphysically present agents.’ We do this all the time when we recall the past or project the future, or imagine ‘what if’ scenarios involving others. It’s not a big leap for those same brain mechanisms to imagine spirits and gods as real.