For a given value of "God"

I would assume that most people who go out to the movie theater now and then have at least one experience similar to my own. You're sitting there, already halfway through your bag of popcorn, and the lights dim for the trailers. Some of the upcoming movies look good, others are just eye-candy (but you know you're going to see it no matter how vapid the premise), and some make you wonder who the hell put up millions of dollars to film such absolute dreck. The last reaction most closely approximates my thoughts when I found out that Oxford is going to get $4,000,000 from the Templeton Foundation to study the question (posed here by Roger Trigg) "What is it that is innate in human nature to believe in God, whether it is gods or something superhuman or supernatural?"

If done right this could be an interesting study. There have been a diversity of theistic & supernatural traditions existing side-by-side for thousands of years; why is this so? What may actually be the case, though, is that the people carrying out this "research" already have the answer in mind. In the Yahoo!News blurb, for instance, Trigg says "One implication that comes from this is that religion is the default position, and atheism is perhaps more in need of explanation." The reason for the rejection of religion (or at least more formal religion) in Europe and elsewhere is something that would be interesting to study, but I don't think that's what Trigg is getting at. What Trigg is saying is that religious belief is something innately human, atheism or rejection of the supernatural tacitly being "unnatural," but there's no reason for us to accept this is inherently true (unless, of course, we believe that it is).

As PZ notes, the study also seems to have an Abrahamic (and primarily Judeo-Christian) slant to it. There are plenty of other belief systems that are not monotheistic, so in order to be in any way accurate Trigg and others would have to define "God" in the widest possible sense, embracing the full panoply of beliefs. The question of why people believe the things they do (and why monotheistic religions presently have the most adherents) is valid, but it seems that Trigg is forgetting that we've moved on since Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. Whatever the group produces, it's likely that it'll try to weld spiritual beliefs onto observations about nature, rather than trying to explain belief in the supernatural through an understanding of nature. Indeed, the latter method is something akin to Carl Sagan's thought experiment in The Varieties of Scientific Experience;

...let's call [a hormone that induces religious experiences] "theophorin," a material that makes you feel religious.

What could the selective advantage of a theophorin be? How would it come about? Why would it be there? Well, what is the nature of the experience? The nature of the experience has, as I say, many different aspects. But one uniform aspect of it is an intense feeling of awe and humility before a power vastly greater than ourselves. And that sounds to me very much like a dominance-hierarchy molecule or part of a suite of molecules whose function it is to fit us into the dominance hierarchies- to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.

Now, what's the good of that? Why would that have any selective advantage? If for no other reason, it would produce social conformity, or, put in more favorable terms, it would ensure social stability and morality. And this is, of course, one of the principal justifications of religion. Any cosmological aspect of the deities is an entirely separate attribute. Consider how we bow our heads in prayer, making a gesture of submission that can be found in many other animals as they defer to the alpha male. We're enjoined in the Bible not to look God in the face, or else we will die instantly. Submissive males of many species, including our own, avert their eyes before an alpha male.

Sagan's example is hypothetical, but it at least makes an attempt to understand human emotions and experiences associated with religion without appealing to a supernatural force that would provide us with the answer even before we asked the question. The majority of people on this planet (and perhaps that have ever lived) have harbored any number of supernatural beliefs and superstitions, but rather than trying to figure out why that is so the Oxford project appears as if it's only going to reinforce that such a phenomena is so. Maybe I'll be proven wrong when it's completed, but I can think of a number of better uses for $4,000,000 than to sink it into a modern-day attempt at natural theology.