He puts it down to genetic predisposition, need for control, and identifying with a group. From Andy Tix at Psychology Today:
Genetics, control, and groups. Like every other behavior psychologists have studied, religious behavior is influenced by an interaction between nature and nurture, in other words. Still, there’s a lot we don’t understand. One tentative answer generates five additional questions. Mystery remains and, I suspect, always will.More.
His approach, well-meaning and friendly, is just the sort of schlock that discredits psychology. The problem is, he is throwing around terms and concepts from studies that are rarely worth the space they take up on a hard drive.
Once you get past: Mother Theresa was religious and so were Torquemada and Pat Boone, you realize that Psychology Today will not offer much insight, though great artists, physicists, and philosophers might.
See also: Darwin, Marx, and Freud: Now Freud is the “triumph of pseudoscience”? History walk: Remember when we ID folk were accused of inventing all this? No? See Textbook Watch: Did ID folk invent Marx, Freud, and Darwin as the “textbook triad” of materialism?
If naturalism can explain religion, why does it get so many basic facts wrong?
Evolutionary conundrum: is religion a useful, useless, or harmful adaptation?
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness