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I would like to add a question to this discussion: Would Piaget consider religious belief, fantasy and self-deception to be adaptive in an evolutionary sense? If so, what does the genesis of the concept of God as an almighty, all knowing, all loving, abstract person look like? In _The Child's Conception of the World _, Piaget mentions the cognitive dissonance religious education may cause to the child with its talk about an abstract person. He claims that children regard their parents as being the only real gods and that the introduction of this new abstract person is difficult far them to assimilate. Once we assimilate the concept of an abstract personal God and build a whole worldview upon this foundation, I wonder how much energy would be needed for an adult individual to accomodate to the scientific and technological worldview. Much theological debate in the public arena is compromised by the lack of an adequate distinction between concept (or criterion) and object. If we aren't clear about what is the criterion of God, we will never be able to properly decide whether we can consider Him to exist or not. I expect Piaget would have approached this issue from a genetic-epistemological point of view more or less along these lines.
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