the effect that religion makes the world "more beautiful" or "more
meaningful," that it addresses "ultimate" questions.
Another way of escaping the conflict is the attempt, especially pop-
ular among some scientists, to create a purified religion, a metaphysi-
cal doctrine that saves some aspects of religious concepts (there is a
creative force, it is difficult for us to know it, it explains why the world
is the way it is, etc.) but removes all traces of inconvenient "supersti-
tion" (e.g., God is hearing me, people got a disease as a punishment
for their sins, accomplishing the ritual in the right way is essential,
etc.). Is such a religion compatible with science? It certainly is, since it
was designed for that very purpose. Is it likely to become what we usu- [321]
ally call a religion? Hardly. In the actual history of human groups,
people have had religious thoughts for cognitive reasons in practical
contexts. These thoughts do some work. They produce relevant com-
ments on situations like death or birth or marriage, etc. Metaphysical
"religions" that will not dirty their hands with such human purposes
and concerns are about as marketable as a car without an engine.
But the conflict is not just about the database. Science showed not
only that some stories about the formation of planets were decidedly
below par but also that there was something dramatically flawed in
principleabout religion as a way of knowing things and that there was a
better way of gathering reliable information about the world.
Religious concepts, as I said, invariably recruit the resources of
mental systems that would be there, religion or no. This is why reli-
gion is a likelything. That is, given our minds' evolved dispositions,
the way we live in groups, the way we communicate with other people
and the way we produce inferences, it is very likely that we will find in
any human group some religious representations of the form
described in this book, whose surface details are specific to a particular
group.
In contrast, as biologist Lewis Wolpert suggests, scientific activity
is quite "unnatural" given our cognitive dispositions. Indeed, many of
the intuitive inference systems I described here are based on assump-
tions that scientific research has shown to be less than compelling.
This is why acquiring some part of the scientific database is usually
more difficult than acquiring religious representations.
What makes scientific knowledge-gathering special is not just its
departure from our spontaneous intuitions but also the special kind of
communication it requires, not just the way one mind works but also
how other minds react to the information communicated. Scientific
WHYBELIEF?