[10] Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship.
[4] Warfare is a good example of a cost of group living, and Richard Sosis, Howard C. Kress, and James S. Boster carried out a cross-cultural survey which demonstrated that men in societies which engage in war do submit to the costliest rituals.
Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79% showed a positive influence.
[19] Such studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR program which covered University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality correlated with a lower viral load and improved immune-cell levels in HIV patients.
[20] Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health.
[22] A criticism of such placebo effects, as well as the advantage of religion giving a sense of meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than religious behavior could achieve such goals.
He argues that one such factor is that it has, in most cases, been advantageous for humans to remember "minimally counter-intuitive" concepts that are somewhat different from the daily routine and somewhat violate innate expectations about how the world is constructed.
[8] Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyer suggest that humans evolved a "hazard-precaution system" which allowed them to detect potential threats in the environment and to attempt to respond appropriately.
Lienard and Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system itself may have provided fitness benefits, and that religion then "associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".
He suggests that the structure and development of human minds make belief in the existence of a supreme god (with properties such as being superknowing, superpowerful and immortal) highly attractive.
He suggests that one of the fundamental mental modules in the brain is the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), another potential system for identifying danger.
"[27] Though hominids probably began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition and mates, Terror Management Theory argues that this happened before they had reached the point where significant self- (and thus end-of-self-) awareness arose.
The main strategy to do so was to "become an individual of value in a world of meaning … acquiring self-esteem [via] the creation and maintenance of culture", as this would counter the sense of insignificance represented by death and provide: 1) symbolic immortality through the legacy of a culture that lives on beyond the physical self ("earthly significance") 2) literal immortality, the promise of an afterlife or continued existence featured in religions ("cosmic significance").
In The God Delusion (2006) Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned,[citation needed] their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses".
This model holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal with problems of survival and reproduction.
[29] Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold, passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard ontological categories (person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object) with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses that remember what happened in them, etc.).
This may result in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral guidelines).