gods and the mental instincts that create them 255nation of what caused it. That is, people’s thoughts about such salient events
are organized by the mental templates of social exchange. These do not nec-
essarily require gods and spirits. But if you have concepts of gods and spirits,
it is not too surprizing that they should sometimes be included in explanations
of salient events. If your representation of misfortune generally treats it as an
effect of social exchange violations, it will potentially include any agent with
whom you interact. But spirits and gods are precisely represented as engaging
in social interaction with people, especially in social exchange. So they are
among the potential candidates for originators of misfortune, just like neigh-
bors, relatives, and envious partners.
Religion, Interpretation, and Explanation
This account of religious concepts and behaviors stands in contrast to other
traditions in the study of religion in several different ways. First, the kind of
evolutionary-cognitive framework outlined here is quite clearly reductionistic.
That is, it aims to show that the appearance and spread of religious concepts
are adequately explained in terms of underlying mental processes and events.
In this sense it stands in sharp contrast to interpretative or hermeneutic frame-
works. The point here is not to describe what it is like to entertain religious
thoughts, or in what way these thoughts could make sense, but to account for
their occurrence and their features.
Second, this accounts suggests that religious processes are not sui generis.
They do not require that we assume a specific religious organ or religious mode
of function in the mind. Most of the processes described here as constituting
religious thought are present in all human minds. In the same way as music
is made possible by features of the auditory cortex that would be present,
music or no music, our basic cognitive equipment would be the same, religion
or not.
Third, this evolutionary account is not dramatic or epic. Our views on
religion are generally skewed by an intuitive assumption that dramatic phe-
nomena should have dramatic explanations. Because religion is central to
many people’s experience, has salient social effects, and has often triggered
historical tragedies, we think the explanation should be equally momentous.
It may be difficult to think that a slight tweaking of ordinary intuitions, together
with small but real effects on memory and inference, are enough to produce
all the drama of religion in history. Yet I think that is a common situation in
science, that dramatic phenomena have rather prosaic explanations.
Is there a religious instinct? I think the evidence presented here does not
quite support the notion of an evolved propensity to religious concepts and
norms, with its own brain implementation and its own evolutionary history.
People who think there is a religious instinct often choose to focus on one