Numen & Natural Selection

One might offer a rather straightforward explanation for the sense of the numinous that can arise in natural places, or any sense anywhere of something being present that isn't. Just as the brain massively overcompensates vis-a-vis sexual urges and the amount of sex required to make a new person (one presumes as a way of guaranteeing reproduction, come what exigent circumstances may), so too, to guarantee physical survival in a world filled with stealthy human and nonhuman predators, the brain may have been selected to overinterpret the presence of other beings from slight nuanced changes in sensory input. After all, when it comes to things like fire safety, assuming a certain level of unknowability and uncertainty, do we prefer our children to overcompensate or undercompensate? 

A counterargument could be that if the undercorrecting nonheightened state of awareness leads to more death (by prehistoric megafauna!), it is arguably a less reliable interface with material reality. The healthy adult mind at rest is often cited as the best perspective for sound decision-making. This may be true as far as conventional decisions and conventional life are concerned. Yet, it is the conventional adult mind state that may be most deeply trapped in illusion, the one that credulously buys into the perspective that comes from the plane of reality into which it is embedded. As the zen koan goes, what was your face before you were born?

I have no solution.