(Un)wired For God; Religious beliefs may not be innate.

At last check, intimations of mortality had not been banished from the human mind-the Grim Reaper still stalks our thoughts. Nor have our brain circuits shaken their habit of perceiving patterns in chaos, such as seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of burned toast; imagining the invisible hand of a supernatural agent in acts of randomness, as in "answered" prayers; and conjuring what anthropologist Pascal Boyer of Washington University calls "non-physically present agents." We use the same circuitry to envision "what if" scenarios about our pasts or futures as we do to imagine angels and demons...