The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God [signed]

From the dawn of our species, every culture has maintained a belief in some form of a spiritual reality. Wouldn't this imply that human spirituality must represent an inherent characteristic of our species, that is, a genetically inherited trait? Are Humans "wired" to believe in the universal concepts of a god, a soul, and an afterlife? Are what we call spiritual/religious experiences strictly physiological in nature, the effects of our brain's chemistry? Does God really exist "out there," beyond and ondependent of us? Or is God merely the product of an inherited human perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation - a coping mechanism - one that emerged in our species to enable us to survive our unique and otherwise debilitating awareness of death?