So consider again the general statement that children are underde-
veloped versions of adults. There are many situations in which one or
several of your inference systems produced interpretations of chil-
dren's reactions that also supported that general statement. Your
agreement with the statement will become stronger and more consis-
tent as you experience moreof these situations and they involve more
diversesystems. The intuitive plausibility of the idea—children are like
us, minus some crucial properties—becomes greater as more and
more different systems produce intuitions compatible with that gen-
eral interpretation.
[316] This process, it seems, works in the same way for religious assump-
tions. The moral system makes sense of people's statements about
moral actions by imagining the ancestors or God as witnesses to
actions, but that is only a conjecture that makes other people's behav-
ior more relevant. In the same way, the inference that an ancestor or
God is around is produced as a relevant interpretation of the fact that
people sometimes seem to be talking to nobody in particular. But that
is only a conjecture that would make their behavior relevant to the
intuitive psychology system. The premise that the ancestors or God
have rescued the dead person's soul explains some of the inconsistent
intuitions we have about that person, but that again is only a premise
that is used by a special system to make sense of our own reactions and
of other people's behavior. The fact that similarpremises (e.g., the
ancestors are here, God is watching) are used by differentsystems to
produce inferences may well strengthen their salience in each of these
systems.
This in a way is counterintuitive, because it suggests that a concept
of gods or spirits is all the more likely to do inferential work in the
mind if it is notentertained as a unified concept and is not kept in a
religious domain apart from other mental structures. On the contrary,
it is likely to have direct effects on people's thoughts, emotions and
behaviors if it is distributed among different systems in the mind. This
seems surprising because we are used to a special kind of cultural envi-
ronment in which religious beliefs are objects of debate,that is, are
considered explicitly, defended in terms of evidence, plausibility, desir-
ability, beneficial effects, or conversely debunked in terms of their lack
of evidence or their intrinsic absurdity. But this is a very special kind of
culture, as I emphasized in the previous chapter. Even in this special
environment, it is quite likely that people who do have religious
RELIGION EXPLAINED