are not material, they are somehow "like the wind," and also that they
have left their body. The ghosts are described as generally invisible but
people have very different views about what this means and are seldom
confident that their own interpretation is correct. The ghosts are con-
strued as what is left of a person once the body is no more. But then the
ghosts are also said to seewhat people do. How can ghosts see without
eyes? Christians are told that man was created in God's image, but like
most religious statements this is ambiguous enough to receive many dif-
ferent, contextually appropriate interpretations.
Most religious traditions routinely flout the requirement of consis-
[300] tency. Indeed, some religious claims are precisely designedto violate it.
Skeptics are baffled by the Christian notions that three persons are one
person, that God is omnipotent but we are free agents, and by many
other apparently inconsistent claims. When they ask for clarification
they are generally given extremely confusing answers that seem to avert
inconsistency at the price of, again, violating the requirement of clarity.
As for evidence... whatever believers consider to be "evidence" for
the existence of gods, spirits and ancestors as well as their powers has
always struck all outsiders as evidence for no such thing. In fact, it is
evidence only at the price of violating the requirement that we should
only have refutable beliefs. If you are told that a high dose of vitamins
can help the body fight an infection, the only evidence that really
counts is a test that could refute the claim: if for instance clinical tests
showed that patients treated with vitamins had no better recovery than
those without vitamins, this would cast doubt on the alleged benefit of
such a treatment. Religious claims are not refutable at all in this sense.
The situation may in fact be even worse than that. For centuries,
philosophers have described these failures of mental management that
supposedly lead people to unwarranted beliefs. But philosophers only
had the tools of introspection and reasoning to figure out how minds
worked. When psychologists replaced all these with experimental
studies, they found a whole menagerie of mental processes that appar-
ently conspire to lead us away from clear and supported beliefs. Con-
sider for instance the following:
Consensus effect: People tend to adjust their impression of a scene to how
others describe it; for instance, they may perceive a facial
expression as one of anger, but if various people around them see it
as one of disgust, they too say they perceive it as expressing that
emotion.RELIGION EXPLAINED