died because they were distressed. We don't think that the animal
leaped up because it was pushed by a gust of wind. We reserve our
physical causes for mechanical events, biological causes for growth
and decay and psychological causes for emotions and behavior.
So the mind does not work like one general "let's-review-the-facts-
and-get-an-explanation" device. Rather, it comprises lots of special-
ized explanatory devices, more properly called inference systems, each of
which is adapted to particular kinds of events and automatically sug-
gests explanations for these events. Whenever we produce an explana-
tion of any event ("the window broke because the tennis ball hit it";
"Mrs. Jones is angry that the kids broke her window"; etc.), we make [17]
use of these special inference systems, although they run so smoothly
in the mind that we are not aware of their operation. Indeed, spelling
out how they contribute to our everyday explanations would be
tedious (e.g., "Mrs. Jones is angry andanger is caused by unpleasant
events caused by other people andanger is directed at those people and
Mrs. Jones knows the children were playing next to her house andshe
suspects the children knew that tennis balls could break a window and
.. ."). This is tedious because our minds run all these chains of infer-
ences automatically, and only their results are spelled out for con-
scious inspection.
By discussing and taking seriously the "religion-as-explanation"
scenario, we open up a new perspective on how religious notions work
in human minds. Religious concepts may seem out of the ordinary, but
they too make use of the inference systems I just described. Indeed,
everything I just said about Mrs. Jones and the tennis ball would apply
to the ancestors or witches. Returning to Evans-Pritchard's anecdote
of the collapsed roof, note how some aspects of the situation were so
obvious that no one—neither the anthropologist nor his interlocu-
tors—bothered to make them explicit: for instance, that the witches, if
they were involved, probably had a reason to make the roof collapse,
that they expected some revenge or profit from it, that they were
angry with the persons sitting underneath, that they directed the
attack to hurt thosepeople, not others, that the witches could see their
victims sitting there, that they will attack again if their reasons for
striking in the first place are still relevant or if their attack failed, and
so on. No one need say all this—no one even thinksabout it in a con-
scious, deliberate manner—because it is all self-evident.
Which leads me to two major themes I will expand on in the fol-
lowing chapters. The way our banal inference systems work explains a
WHATISTHEORIGIN?