time of the day is unexpected but does not violate innate ontological categor-
ies. Healing with saliva (e.g., Mk 7:33) is an intuitive technique that relies on
demonstrable physiological effects: saliva contains healing substances. Many
therapies in biblical literature change intuitive healing processes (which might
or might not comply with modern scientific theory) into paradoxical (but
not strictly counterintuitive) events by adding extraordinary difficulties. For
example, the man healed in John 9 has been blind since birth and the one at
the pool of Bethsaida (John 5:1–20) had been crippled for thirty-eight years.
Healing from a distance is an ambiguous feature of some miracle stories (Matt.
8:5–13; Luke 7:1–10; John 4:51–53). Generally speaking, we do not expect
physical interactions to take place at a distance (Spelke, 1990; Spelke &
Kinzler, 2007; Barrett, 2008). This seems to be contradicted by thefindings
of the voodoo doll experiment and related studies discussed section 6.3,
suggesting that people do have intuitions about being able to influence other
people’s well-being at a distance. Note, however, that the participants in these
experiments had intuitive responses to their own actions (rather than reacting
to a miracle story) as well as they had strong emotions toward the people they
believed to manipulate from a distance. Thus miracles stories featuring healing
from a distance could be counterintuitiveandprovide support for performing
magical actions under some specific circumstances.
Healings and other miracles often receive a counterintuitive edge because
they are attributed to divine intervention (as is the rule in biblical literature) or
because the condition that necessitates them (such as illness) is explained by
divine punishment or demonic influence. Gods and spirits are always counter-
intuitive because they combine human psychological and other features with
elements that contradict expectations about humans: being invisible, being
present at more than one physical location at a time, transforming themselves
into different shapes, having infinite knowledge, etc. (Boyer, 2001, pp. 65–91;
Pyysiäinen, 2009; Czachesz, 2012b, 2012d, pp. 141–80). The involvement of
counterintuitive agency in miracles (as opposed to featuring objects that
change shape or levitate, for example) makes a difference. As we have seen
in section 4.7, empirical evidence (Steenstra, 2005; Porubanova et al., 2014)
suggests that (counterintuitive) concepts involving agency are remembered
better than other concepts. Boyer (2001, pp. 137–67) argued that counter-
intuitive agents matter more than other counterintuitive ideas because they
have minds, are capable of social interaction, and make moral judgments.
Further, it has been shown that the amount of counterintuitive and“ordinary”
details in a given text influences the memorability of the text (Norenzayan &
Atran, 2004). Counterintuitive details not only help texts remain in memory
longer, but they are also attention-grabbing. As a consequence, we can
expect that stories containing a certain amount of miraculous details have a
good chance both to be noticed easier and to be remembered longer than
other texts.
134 Cognitive Science and the New Testament