gods and the mental instincts that create them 239resenting and predicting various parts of the environment, or guiding action
in different domains according to different principles. None of these systems
is about religion. But some of them may be activated, in the context of repre-
senting religious agents, in such a way that concepts of such agents have a
high probability of transmission. So examining which systems are activated in
this way, and how they fashion different aspects of viable cultural concepts,
should explain not only just why we have these religious notions, but also why
we do not have others, in other words explain the recurrent features of such
concepts.
This requires that we go beyond what people know and believe, to the
underlying systems that support such knowledge and belief. The main strategy
in the study of religion so far was to justaskpeople about their religious
concepts. This is of course an indispensable first step, but we cannot stop there.
It is not just that people’s explanations may be vague and idiosyncratic (though
they are). It is also that we have no good reason to assume that people have
much access to the cognitive machinery that produces those concepts. People
after all have no access to the way their brains turn two-dimensional retinal
images into three-dimensional visual representations, or to how they produce
syntactic sentences. People can feel the difference between two sentences
(“who did you see me with?” and “who did you see me and?,” respectively)
without being able to explain why one is ungrammatical. The same point ap-
plies to concepts. Some notions are easier to acquire than others, some con-
ceptual associations are better recalled, and some create stronger emotional
effects. All this depends on processes largely beyond conscious access, in the
same way as the workings of the visual cortex.
What I am offering here is a multiple-system explanation of religion. I do
not believe in magic bullet, single-cause explanations of religion, not just be-
cause religion is complex, but also because religion is a cultural phenomenon.
It is something you get from other people and something you will contribute
to transmit to others. What we call “religion” aresuccessfulreligious concepts
and norms. That is, they are the ones that survived many cycles of individual
acquisition and transmission. The rest, these possible variants that were en-
tertained but then forgotten, or adopted by a few but distorted by others, these
unsuccessful variants just do not register. That religion is successful religion,
in this sense, suggests that it activates many different mental systems in ways
that favor retention and transmission. The emphasis should be onmultiple
mental systems. A durably successful cultural institution is like a durably suc-
cessful economy, which probably owes its perennial success not to one single
factor (good natural resources, just enough people, the right kind of culture, a
lucky history, etc.) but to the fortunate combination of most of these. The same
goes for cultural transmission, so that religion is successful for many reasons
instead of one. It may be frustrating for those who hoped that a single-shot
account would do most of the explanatory work. As we will see, the brain-based