This chapter envisions religion, in general, and awareness of the supernatural, in particular, as a converging by-product of several cognitive and emotional mechanisms that evolved under natural selection for mundane adaptive tasks. As human beings routinely interact, they naturally tend to exploit these by-products to solve inescapable, existential problems that have no apparent worldly solution, such as the inevitability of death and the ever-present threat of deception by others. Religion involves costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterintuitive world of supernatural agents that master such existential anxieties. The greater one's display of costly commitment to that factually absurd world — as in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his beloved son for nothing palpable save faith in a “voice” demanding the killing — the greater society's trust in that person's ability and will to help out others with their inescapable problems.
Keywords: religion, evolution, supernatural agent, folk psychology, module, metarepresentation, intuitive ontology