Are Humans Adaptive for the God Niche?

This paper challenges - from a theological standpoint - the tendency of CSR and other evolutionary accounts of religion to discount the truth claims of religion, or to argue that in fact religion is stronger if the content is false or hard to prove. The argument is made that there are rational reasons to see the co-option of cognitive mechanisms to the purpose of religion as adaptations to the God-niche. The argument is also made that the parallel set of co-options in mathematics is self-validating in its effectiveness in physics, and that mathematics therefore helps to support the possibility of and likelihood that the religious co-options are not self-deceiving.