now? I think we are, but the explanation is nota quick, shoot-from-the
hip solution of the kind that many people, either religious or not,
seem to favor. There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence
and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of
aggregate relevance—that is, of successful activation of a whole variety
of mental systems. This is also the case for belief, as we will see
presently.
Indeed, the activation of a panoply of systems in the mind explains
the very existence of religious concepts andtheir cultural success and
the fact that people find them plausible andthe fact that not everyone
[298] finds them so andthe way religion appeared in human history andits
persistence in the context of modern science. I realize it is a bit fool-
hardy to promise to kill so many birds with one stone, especially when
the stone seems so awkward to handle. What do I mean by "activating
various systems"? What I do notmean is that "there are many aspects
to religion," "it is a complicated domain," and "many factors are
involved." In fact my ambition in writing this book was precisely to
escape from such bromides and to extract clear explanations from cog-
nitive science.
What I mean is far more precise. There is some experimental evi-
dence for different inference systems with specific domains of input.
Religious cues trigger activation of a particular list of these systems,
which increases the likelihood that concepts of this kind get built in
human minds, that they appear intuitively plausible, that someone
agrees with their explicit formulation, that they are left untouched by
such corrosive influences as that of science. But note that all this is not
so much caused asmade more likely by the cognitive processes I
described.
What we know from evolutionary biology, psychology, archaeology
and anthropology is a set of factors that constitute the collective and
invisible hand of cultural evolution. We humans are generally not very
keen on invisible hand explanations. As philosopher Robert Nozick
once pointed out, we tend to prefer hidden hand scenarios, where there
is a real conspirator: the masters of the universe who pull all the
strings, or in this case a particular feature of the human mind that cre-
ates the whole of religion, a central metaphysical urge that is at the
origin of all religion, an irredeemable human propensity toward
superstition, myth and faith, or a special emotion that only religion
provides, and so on. I can safely predict that there will alwaysbe a mar-
ket for such explanations, but I also think we have evidence that they
RELIGION EXPLAINED