ter at it; training can make them very good. Indeed, there are archery
and darts champions whose capacities are quite impressive. Now if
you want to explain the difference between humans and chimpanzees
in this domain, will you study only the champions? It is of course
interesting to see how they manage their feats, but that is not the
issue. Since all children are endowed from an early age with some tal-
ent for throwing objects, as most parents know all too well, it is clear
that the champions' capacities are derived from this common poten-
tial. It is clearly not the champions' feats that create the toddlers' eye-
hand coordination.
[310] William James and many others after him thought that religion
worked the other way around, that some exceptional people created
the concepts and the multitude degraded them. In this view, the
notion of an invisible supernatural agent, or of a soul being around
after the body is dead, or of unconscious zombies remote-controlled
by witches, or of extra organs flying about on banana leaves, all this
was first created by some gifted individuals with intense experience,
and then proved to be convincing or arresting enough to be adopted
(though in a blander, less experiential form) by other people.
But this is rather misguided. First, note that we have no real evi-
dence of this happening for most religious concepts. For all we know,
the notion of evur in people's stomachs may have been gradually
refined during thousands of episodes when people told other people
fantastic tales (in the same way urban legends and other popular
rumors gradually take on a stable form) rather than put forth by an
inspired Fang prophet. But even on occasions when exceptional indi-
viduals come up with some new versions of the religious repertoire, it
is still the case that these specific versions would make no sense, they
would have no effects at all, unless people already had all the cognitive
equipment that helps them build such concepts. Even if prophets were
the main source of new religious information, that information would
still require ordinary nonprophets' minds to turn it into some particu-
lar form of religion. You can always proclaim that traditional ancestors
and Christian angels are the same persons, as some inspired new
prophets teach in syncretic African religions. It takes people with a
prior disposition for concepts of invisible supernatural agents to make
sense of such pronouncements. This is why we will probably not
understand the diffusion of religion by studying exceptional people,
but we may well have a better grasp of religion in general, including
RELIGION EXPLAINED