(5) There is only one God! He is omniscient but powerless. He cannot
do anything or have any effect on what goes on in the world.
(6) The gods are watching us and they notice everything we do! But
they forget everything instantaneously.
(7) Some people can see the future but they then forget it
immediately.
(8) Some people can predict future events, though only about thirty
seconds in the future.
(9) There is only one God! However, he has no way of finding out
what goes on in the world.
[72] (10) This statue is special because it vanishes whenever someone thinks
about it.
(11) There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on
Wednesdays.
(12) The spirits will punish you if you do what they want.
(13) This statue is special because you see it here but actually it's
everywhere in the world.
They all include violations: (7) is counterintuitive because our intu-
itive ontology, as we will see below, places very strict conditions on
what it is to have a mind. In particular, it assumes that minds form per-
ceptions because of actual events that occur in their environments. As a
result of these perceptions, minds form beliefs about what happened.
In our intuitive concept of a mind there are causal links that go from
events to perceptions and from perceptions to beliefs, not the other
way around. So a mind that has beliefs or representations of events that
have not occurred yet is counterintuitive. The same applies to the
other examples. There is a god who perceives everything (5); this vio-
lates our intuitive notion of mind, following which perception is always
focused on some objects and has limited access to what happens. (13) is
counterintuitive because material objects like statues are expected to
have one location in the world; they are somewhere or somewhere else
but not in two locations at the same time, let alone everywhere at once.
Here is the reason why these concepts are not quite satisfactory,
although they do include a violation: Religious concepts comprise (a)
an ontological label and (b) a particular tag. In all the "good" items we
have examined so far, the tag contradicted some of the information
given by the label. Notice that I was careful to say some,notallof the
information provided by the ontological label. The point is crucial.
Consider two of our favorites again:RELIGION EXPLAINED