The Evolution of God

Support for a hardwired connection between social dominance and morality is the pan-cultural belief in an absolutely dominant being that sets rules of morality. A quest to determine  justification for assigning moral attributes to some behavior inevitably leads to the postulation of some God-like being because feelings associated with morality (shame, guilt, anger) are cognitively linked to perception of status and authority (due to the selective pressures of the social environment in which we evolved i.e. small groups).  An example of this link from the other end of the spectrum is the fact that killing animals for meat doesn't induce guilt in most people because for them the animals they eat are of sufficiently low status. This in part explains why people typically don’t eat the same species of animals they keep as pets.