"Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes," he writes. Those mechanisms include conformist bias (believing what your peers believe, in order to get along), a tendency to explain events in terms of personal agency (since our mental machinery for thinking about causality evolved in the context of social interaction), and interest in remote control (a bias toward beliefs that promise influence over predators, diseases, and bad weather). Given these biases, we're prone to believe in powerful, jealous, tempestuous personal deities.

Sounds about right. These things can be demonstrated.