Quote:If some evolutionary change were the salient detail then we would expect the god gene to still be with us, and we would also expect god beliefs and the god gene to have a discoverable hereditary pattern, and we would expect that the distribution of god artifacts would generally reflect that pattern.
No one has made any claim to have discovered a "god" gene. As a matter of most recent research, mapping genes to individual traits is not the right way to look at it anyway. It's the gene expression that matter. Many individual may have same gene but that gene may not express itself similarly (or express itself at all) across those individuals because genes interact with environment and express themselves in myriad different ways. Epigenetic is more recent way of looking at genes. Anyway. That's a minor digression.
The point here is that our mind thinks teleologically. It sees purpose, design, and intent in nature. The byproduct of it is "someone watching over us and guiding our way along". This teleological way of looking at nature has some benefits. The concept of god itself is a cultural phenomenon born out of contrivance to manage larger social groups (societies). It stuck because it maps to our teleological way of thinking and was a logical transition as our learning brain learned to solve more complex social problems. As humans thought more about "someone watching over us" over generations over a period of tens of thousands of years, the incrementalism in knowledge and thought led to more refined notions and associations with our observations (e.g. no rain so "the someone watching over for rain...let's call it rain god, must be angry with us") that eventually made into "god".
