A number of factors may have been involved in the evolution of man’s capacity for spirituality. These include a reduction in the fear of death, a feeling of being in better control over a hostile environment, a feeling of being monitored for moral behavior, improved social cohesiveness, and greater feelings of joy, happiness and optimism. These in turn may have had selective value by allowing spiritual individuals to more easily escape life-threatening circumstances, to make better hunters and warriors, to have greater resistance to stress and disease, to behave morally, to belong to a protective religious group, and to have greater appeal to a sexual partner…
Humans are unique in that they are aware of and fear their own mortality. A major driving force behind the invention of The Theory of God was to provide a way to alleviate these fears by proposing that humans had a soul that was immortal.
Spirituality can be defined as a feeling of a connection with something greater than oneself including any form of social order. Perhaps the greatest factor in the evolution of spirituality is that such a trait would maximize the development of man as a social animal. [p513]
