Mitchell, you are arguing for the position that “Some believe religion provides benefits and increases evolutionary fitness. In other words, it’s adaptive and is selected for, which means there are genetic predispositions for religion.” You contrast that view with the view of “a prevailing cohort of academics in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) field believe religion is a byproduct of other evolved cognitive features such as a theory of mind or the hyperactive agency detection device.”

I think you are partly right but mostly wrong in your argument, as I will attempt to explain here.

First, we must distinguish as you do between religious practices or rituals and religious beliefs – usually beliefs in supernatural beings and often in immortal souls and beliefs in moral versus immoral behavior. As others have pointed out, religious practices don't differ significantly from other meditative or inspirational practices. From the universality of such practices among human groups across vast amounts of time and geography, it seems clear that they have some basis in our genetic makeup. But in that respect they confirm the byproduct position that the evolutionary value of religious practices is essentially part of a package with the evolutionary value of non-religious meditative or inspirational practices

So whatever unique evolutionary adaptive value can be attributed to religion must lie in the area of religious beliefs, and behaviors that follow from those beliefs. Again, other people have observed that ideas of moral versus immoral behavior seem to have ancient evolutionary roots, common among animals of other species and predating human adoptions of other religious beliefs.

That would leave us with the question of whether there is some evolutionarily adaptive value to religious beliefs about such things as supernatural beings and immortality. My position on that question is that it is highly plausible that our beliefs about such things derive from our earliest experiences as infants and young children. When we are born, we become aware of beings – our parents – who are apparently possessed of powers of omniscience and omnipotence. We depend on them totally for our very existence. They come and go from our immediate presence, but we soon learn that they will always return, even when they are absent, and we learn to accept the idea that people and other things persist even when they are out our direct presence.

As we grow older, we learn that our parents are not, in fact, omniscient or omnipotent, and that they, and we, will ultimately die. But those earliest, fundamental ideas of omniscience, omnipotence, and persistence are very hard to unlearn. It's easiest and most comforting to extend them by projection to gods (God the Father or the Goddess Mother) and to immortality. So whatever evolutionarily adaptive value such religious beliefs may have could, indeed, be a byproduct of other genetically-based human characteristics that are manifest in our infancy.