gods and the mental instincts that create them 251explaining situations to them. Now, as I said above, some supernatural agents
are represented by default as having full access to strategic information. That
is, people represent a given situation, and represent some information about
it that is relevant to social interaction, and they assume that the supernatural
agent also has that information. (Again, all this consists in tacit assumptions.)
This means that, in morally relevant situations, a concept of god or spirit or
ancestor is very likely to be activated as the most relevant way to fill in the
empty placeholder. After representing a particular behavior as wrong, and feel-
ing guilty, it seems quite natural to assume that some other agent with full
access also feels the behavior was wrong.
Indeed, this connection may gain additional salience from the fact that the
moral intuition system, like other inference systems in our minds, is not really
open to conscious inspection. That is, we have moral intuitions without having
much access to the computational operations whereby the system produced
such intuitions. Associating concepts of full-access supernatural agents to
moral intuitions may well provide a post hoc rationalization of the intuitions.
So, in a sense, concepts of gods and spirits are made morerelevantby the
organization of our moral thoughts, which themselves do not especially require
any gods or spirits. What I mean by “relevant” is that the concepts, once put
in this moral context, are both easy to represent and generate many new in-
ferences. For instance, most people feel some guilt when acting in a way which
they suspect is immoral. That is, whatever their self-serving justifications, they
may have the intuition that an agent with a full description of the situation
would still classify it as wrong. Now, thinking of this intuition as “what the
ancestors think of what I did” or “how God feels about what I did” provides
an easy way of representing what is otherwise extremely vague. That is, most
of our moral intuitions are clear but their origin escapes us, because it lies in
mental processing that we cannot consciously access. Seeing these intuitions
as someone’s viewpoint is a simpler way of understanding why we have these
intuitions. But this requires the concept of an agent with full access to strategic
information. These associations are not the origin of the moral feelings, but a
convenient way of commenting upon them. In this sense, moral intuitions and
feelings contribute to the relevance of some supernatural concepts. The latter,
again, can be seen as parasitic upon intuitions that would be there, spirits and
gods or not.
Religious Concepts Exploit Our Intuitions about Misfortune
It may seem that gods and spirits matter to people mainly because these su-
pernatural agents are described as having special powers. The ancestors can
make you sick, or ruin your plantations, God sends people various plagues.
On the positive side, gods and spirits are also represented as protectors, guar-