that of prophets and other virtuosos, by considering how it is derived
from ordinary cognitive capacities.
As I have pointed out repeatedly, the building of religious concepts
requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious
concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious
notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in
general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are para-
sitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint
pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also
parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people play
music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental [311]
capacities are recruited by these activities. The same goes for religion.
Because the concepts require all sorts of specific human capacities (an
intuitive psychology, a tendency to attend to some counterintuitive
concepts, as well as various social mind adaptations), we can explain
religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how
they contribute to the features of religion that we find in so many dif-
ferent cultures. We do not need to assume that there is a specialway of
functioning that occurs only when processing religious thoughts.
Indeed, if I wanted to be the egregious anthropologist, I would
point out that this notion of religion as a special domain is not just
unfounded but in fact rather ethnocentric. This is the view of religion
put forward, for obvious reasons, by what I described in a previous
chapter as religious guilds—that is, the organized groups of religious
specialists typically found in complex states and literate cultures.
Throughout history people have been told that the services provided
by religious specialists concerned a different domain from that of ordi-
nary, practical matters. The official description of supernatural agents
as beings of "another world" implied that mental states directed at
these agents were of a special kind too, as would be any experience of
their presence. That many religious believers, following these guilds,
come to share this assumption is of course quite natural but it is more
surprising to notice that it has often spread to people who study reli-
gion. Even more striking, some of the ardent enemies of religion seem
to share the same view, assuming for instance that the kind of unrea-
son or irrationality that in their view explains religious adherence is
entirely specific. But we can understand religion much better if we
take into account that the processes that create "belief" are the same in
religion and in everyday matters.
WHYBELIEF?