Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129528196&ft=1&f=100

Very interesting story passed along by a colleague - it raises interesting questions about religion and the impact on believing in a higher power - one of the many good quotes from the article

"Bering has a credo, a truth he says he's learned after years of studying this stuff.
"I've always said that I don't believe in God, but I don't really believe in atheists either," Bering says. "Everybody experiences the illusion that God — or some type of supernatural agent — is watching them or is concerned about what they do in their sort of private everyday moral lives."

and "Everywhere you look around the world, you find examples of people altering their behavior because of concerns for supernatural consequences of their actions. They don't do things that they consider bad because they think they'll be punished for it." - Dominic Johnson, professor, University of Edinburgh