One professor thinks so and has developed a computer program to simluate its evolution.

Anthropologist James W. Dow thinks he has an answer: Religion, he says, is actually saved by non-believers.

And he’s got a groundbreaking computer program, dubbed “evogod,” to prove it.

Dow, a professor emeritus at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., devoted much of his career to studying religion in Mexico. But he’s also a trained mathematician.

Evogod uses mathematical models to simulate a pre-literate culture, when the brain was undergoing most of its evolution, Dow says. Scholars often use such models to study human behavior, such as how crowds react under certain circumstances.

Dow populated his simulated society with two groups of people: one that professed a belief in things unseen and unverifiable (think: spirits, gods, etc.), and another that did not. Dow assumes religious faith is a hereditary trait.

Without reading the full paper, it is very hard to figure from where Dow’s assumption of heredity is a valid one.  Given the presence of the conversion experience, this seems to be a very shoddy foundation on which to build an hypothesis.  In other studies, this was something that has been repeatedly inconclusive at best.  We do know that religion has evolutionary benefits which this seems to further substantiate.  It is the other conclusions that seem implausible.