The mistake of intellectualism was to assume that a human mind is
driven by a generalurge to explain. That assumption is no more plausi-
ble than the idea that animals, as opposed to plants, feel a general
"urge to move around." Animals never move about for the sake of
changing places. They are in search of food or safety or sex; their
movements in these different situations are caused by different
processes. The same goes for explanations. From a distance, as it were,
you may think that the general point of having a mind is to explain and
understand. But if you look closer, you see that what happens in a
mind is far more complex; this is crucial to understanding religion.
[16] Our minds are not general explanation machines. Rather, minds
consist of many different, specialized explanatory engines. Consider
this: It is almost impossible to see a scene without seeing it in three
dimensions, because our brains cannot help explainingthe flat images
projected onto the retina as the effect of real volumes out there. If you
are brought up among English speakers you just cannot help under-
standing what people say in that language, that is, explainingcomplex
patterns of sound frequencies as strings of words. People sponta-
neously explainthe properties of animals in terms of some inner prop-
erties that are common to their species; if tigers are aggressive preda-
tors and yaks quiet grazers, this must be because of their essential
nature. We spontaneously assume that the shape of particular tools is
explainedby their designers' intentions rather than as an accidental
combination of parts; the hammer has a sturdy handle and a heavy
head because that is the best way to drive nails into hard materials. We
find that it is impossible to see a tennis ball flying about without spon-
taneously explainingits trajectory as a result of a force originally
imposed on it. If we see someone's facial expression suddenly change
we immediately speculate on what may have upset or surprised them,
which would be the explanationof the change we observed. When we
see an animal suddenly freeze and leap up we assume it must have
detected a predator, which would explainwhy it stopped and ran away.
If our houseplants wither away and die we suspect the neighbors did
not water them as promised—that is the explanation.It seems that our
minds constantly produce such spontaneous explanations.
Note that all these explanation-producing processes are "choosy"
(for want of a better term). The mind does not go around trying to
explain everything and it does not use just any information available to
explain something. We don't try to decipher emotional states on the
tennis ball's surface. We do not spontaneously assume that the plants
RELIGION EXPLAINED