than other religious systems.) Voltaire echoed this thought with his
characteristically wry comment that were cockroaches to have a
notion of God they would probably imagine Him as a very big and
powerful cockroach. All this is familiar, indeed so familiar that for a
long time anthropologists forgot that this propensity requires an
explanation. Why then are gods and spirits so much like humans?
Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie reopened this long-abandoned
question in a book that anticipated some of the cognitive arguments
presented here. Guthrie noted that there is an anthropomorphic ten-
dency not just in visual artifacts, in the art of many different cultures,
but also in visual perception itself. That is, we tend to interpret even [143]
very faint cues in terms of human traits; we see faces in the clouds and
human bodies in trees and mountains. This, naturally, is also found in
concepts of religious agents, many of whose features are strikingly
human. A common explanation is that we imagine person-like agents
who rule our destinies because this produces a reassuringview of our
existence and the world around us. We project human features onto
nonhuman aspects of our world because that makes these aspects more
familiar and therefore less frightening. But as Guthrie points out, this
is not really plausible. Gods and spirits are dangerous and vindictive
every bit as often as they are helpful and benevolent. Moreover, imag-
ining barely detectable agents around oneself is in general rather cold
comfort if one is scared. Suppose you are on your own in a house on a
deserted moor and hear noises around the house. Is it really that reas-
suring to think that they are caused by someone you cannot see? Is it
really better than to imagine that the noise came from branches
brushing against the window?
Guthrie argues that the anthropomorphic trend is a consequence
of the way our cognitive systems work and has little to do with our
preferences, with a desire to imagine the world in this way rather
than that. The solution, for him, is that we imagine person-like
agents because persons are more complexthan other types of objects.
In fact, persons are the most complex type of object we know. Now
our cognitive processes strive to extract as much relevant information
as possible from environments (this is of course an automatic, uncon-
scious process) and produce as many inferences as possible. This is
why, when people are faced with ambiguous cues in their environ-
ment they often "see" faces in the clouds and on the mountains. Our
imagination naturally turns to human-like creations because our intu-
itive understanding of persons is just far more complex than our
WHYGODS AND SPIRITS?