Vol. 41, No. 3, September 2011, 449–469
In Mysterious Ways: On petitionary prayer and subtle
forms of supernatural causation
Maarten Boudry and Johan De Smedt*
Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium
ABSTRACT The psychology of prayer and supernatural causation has
received surprisingly little attention from empirical researchers. This paper
discusses implicit belief patterns about the causal mechanisms by which
God effects changes in the world. The authors offer a psychological account
of belief in supernatural causation based on the existing empirical literature
on petitionary prayer, incorporating mechanisms of psychological selfcorrection and rationalisation, confirmation bias and folk physics. They
propose that religious believers ‘prefer’ modes of divine action that are
subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events: given that
the causal structure of our world is partly inscrutable, beliefs in subtle and
unascertainable modes of supernatural causation will be compelling and cognitively appealing because they are more susceptible to occasional confirmation and less vulnerable to repeated disconfirmation. In other words,
believers who request supernatural interventions that are subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events will have a better chance of
finding themselves in a situation in which they can attribute the events in
question to God answering their prayers. The authors argue that such individual psychological factors play a role in the cultural transmission of
prayer practices as well, leading to culturally widespread beliefs in subtle
forms of supernatural causation.
KEY WORDS petitionary prayer; supernatural causation; divine intervention;
cognitive science of religion; psychological self-correction; theological incorrectness; cultural transmission; epidemiology of religious representations
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform
(William Cowper)
God is silent, now if we can only get Man to shut up
(Woody Allen)
*Corresponding author. Email: Johan.DeSmedt@ugent.be
Introduction
Petitionary prayer is one of the most widespread expressions of religious
behaviour, but surprisingly little is known with regard to its psychological underpinnings.1 Religious believers all over the world have attempted to engage in interactions with gods, spirits, witches, dead ancestors and other supernatural beings
(Zaleski and Zaleski 2005), asking them to intervene on their behalf and bring
safety, good fortune (or bad fortune for others), cure from illness, and many
other goods. The psychological dimension of this interaction with supernatural
beings is a relatively unexplored domain. According to believers, how does God
go about answering prayers? Under which circumstances may one expect supernatural beings to intervene in the natural world? In the gospel of Mark, we read that:
‘What things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and
you shall have them’ (Mark 11:24). However, even the devout will admit that these
are rather high hopes, and often the book of Psalms is more on the mark: ‘Why do
you stand afar off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?’ (Psalm
10:1) In the Christian tradition, the problem of God’s silence in times of trouble has
been pondered by countless theologians and ordinary believers, and as with the
classical problem of theodicy, many ingenious rationalisations have been put
forward (e.g., Howard-Snyder and Moser [2002]; Murray [1993]; Swinburne
[2004]; but see Schellenberg [2006]).
In this paper we discuss a related but equally pertinent question: what implicit
beliefs do people entertain about the mechanisms through which supernatural causation is effected in the natural world? If people see God as an agent capable of
bringing about things in the natural world, of which He is not a part, what implicit
assumptions do they make about his modus operandi?2 More technically, how do
people make sense of the causal connection leading from supernatural cause to
natural effect? (For a philosophical account, see Fales [2010]). We develop an
epidemiology of religious representations concerning petitionary prayer and
supernatural causation, based on the concept of theological incorrectness and
cognitive constraints on the formation and dissemination of religious beliefs. As
a point of departure, we discuss a series of original experiments on the psychology
of prayer conducted by Justin L. Barrett, a cognitive psychologist and leading
figure in the cognitive science of religion (Barrett 2001).
Theological correctness and incorrectness
In the newly emerged field of cognitive science of religion (CSR), researchers have
brought findings from cognitive and developmental psychology and cognitive
anthropology to bear on the explanation of religious ideas and practices (for a
recent overview, see Barrett [2007]; Barrett and Lanman [2008]). CSR researchers
argue that the formation and dissemination of religious representations is
1
Naturally, praying practices are complex and can take a diversity of forms (Zaleski and Zaleski 2005). In
this paper, however, we confine our discussion to petitionary prayer and similar practices in religious
traditions.
2
The notion of modus operandi will be used to denote the purported causal mechanisms by which God
effects changes in the world. As we shall see further on, according to Barrett (2001), humans intuitively
categorise causes into three modes of causation: mechanical, biological and psychosocial.
channelled by a number of domain-specific cognitive systems that are stable across
cultures and that emerge in early childhood (e.g., Spelke and Kinzler [2007]). In
particular, Barrett has argued that a strong inclination to detect agency in the
natural environment is a normal part of human psychology. The evolved mental
module responsible for this inclination, which he termed the Hyperactive
Agency Detection Device, makes us predisposed towards believing in supernatural
entities such as invisible ancestors, immaterial spirits, animals that can change
shape, ghosts, holy mountains, etc. In a review article of the field, Barrett takes
as the main tenet of CSR the thesis that ‘much of what is typically called religion
may be understood as the natural product of aggregated ordinary cognitive processes’ (Barrett 2000: 29).3
One interesting finding that has emerged from this cognitive research is that
people use different versions of the same religious concept under different cognitive load demands (Barrett 1999; Barrett and Keil 1996). Barrett observed that orthodox theology typically dictates properties of supernatural beings that are highly
counterintuitive and that strain our cognitive resources, e.g., omnipotence, omniscience and eternal existence. When questioned about their opinions and given some
time to reflect, people profess to accept official theology, but when they are engaged
in ‘online’ tasks, applying religious concepts in practice, they make tacit assumptions that violate the same theology. Instead, believers tend to fall back on more
intuitive and anthropomorphic versions of supernatural beings. Barrett (1999)
has coined the term ‘theological correctness’ to describe this phenomenon. The
related concept of ‘theological incorrectness’ describes the tendency of believers
to stray from official theology if the latter is too cognitively burdensome (Slone
2004). Boyer (2001: 285) has called this the ‘tragedy of the theologian’. For
example, while Christian doctrine stipulates that God can attend any number of
events at the same time, people are caught reasoning as if God answers one
prayer and then shifts his attention to the next. To take another example,
D. Jason Slone (2004) has argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predetermination
is ‘maximally counterintuitive’, because it leaves no room at all for human free
will; hence, over time, it yielded to a conception of God that is more consonant
with our intuitions.
The practice of prayer faces a number of other theological paradoxes that are
shared by all religious traditions entertaining the notion of supernatural omniscience (Bering and Johnson 2005; Johnson 2005), in particular the three great monotheistic religions. First, praying to an all-knowing being such as God appears rather
pointless, because God is supposed to be aware of my problems in any case.
Second, assuming that God is morally perfect, and that I request something
morally good, God would have already done what I demand from Him anyway.
But then in what sense can praying have any effect (Stump 1979)? If people consistently paid heed to these theological doctrines, they would not be engaged in
3
Although we have framed our discussion in terms of religion, it need not be confined to traditional religious categories. In some cases, the practice of directing requests to supernatural entities may be better
classified as instances of ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’ rather than (institutionalised) religion (see below). This
need not be problematic, as one of the tenets of CSR’s naturalistic approach is precisely a dissolution of
sharp boundaries between such categories as religion, superstition, magic and pseudoscience. By
explaining religious beliefs and practices as predictable by-products of our basic cognitive architecture,
the CSR approach automatically brings religion closer to other expressions of human nature.
petitionary prayer. Nevertheless, religious believers who assent to official theology
cannot help but inform God about their problems, just as they would do with
ordinary social actors who have no full epistemic access to their inner mental life.
According to Barrett: ‘The simplification of concepts from the theological to the religious level appears to consist of a systematic distortion of features such that they
more closely resemble intuitive ontological assumptions’ (Barrett 2000: 30).
In this paper, we focus on another form of cognitive tension that arises from
traditional theology with respect to prayer. If God is an all-powerful Being, prima
facie He may perform actions in almost any way He chooses.4 Normal human
agents are known to have limited causal powers: they have a spatially located
body they can control to effect physical causation (but with limited strength and
dexterity), they can communicate through speech within a certain range, as well
as through indirect means (like cell phones or signalling), etc. With a supernatural
agent like God, things are different. Lay religious believers generally do not receive
a lot of instruction regarding the mode of operation of the divine being to which
they direct their requests (Barrett 2001: 268). A similar problem applies to any
supernatural being who is conceived as very powerful and capable of action in
the natural world. As the theory of theological incorrectness suggests, however,
the praying habits of ordinary believers need not reflect the theological doctrine
of omnipotence.
Modes of supernatural causation
In an interesting paper on petitionary prayer among North American Protestants,
Barrett (2001) applies the theory of theological correctness to divine omnipotence in
Christianity. Christian theology does not specify precisely how God affects changes
in the world. Barrett predicts that the silence of orthodox theology with respect to
God’s preferred modus operandi leaves a ‘theological vacuum’ (Barrett 2001: 268). To
fill this theological vacuum, present-day philosophers of religion have come up
with sophisticated accounts of divine causation, such as, e.g., God acting on the
level of quantum indeterminacies (Murphy 1995). However, folk conceptions of
(divine) causation exhibit less explanatory depth, but rather rely on a vague
notion of an underspecified generative link between cause and effect (De Smedt
and De Cruz 2011). Relying on developmental and cognitive psychological
theories, Barrett (2001) argues that humans intuitively make a distinction
between three modes of causation: mechanical, biological, and psychosocial.5
Accordingly, God may act either mechanically (materialising or removing physical
objects, influencing physical processes), biologically (affecting the health of living
4
Of course, God cannot perform any actions that either involve logical contradictions (creating a round
triangle), violate his other attributes (committing a sin, since He is morally perfect) or that are self-defeating (creating a stone that He cannot lift). Further limitations may apply, but they are not relevant to our
purpose, as people rarely pray for divine actions that involve such outright contradictions. In this
context, all we want to argue is that there is no a priori reason to expect an omnipotent (or very powerful)
being to perform only certain types of action as opposed to others.
5
One may object against Barrett’s threefold distinction that it does not provide an adequate typology of
causation. What is important in this regard, however, is how people intuitively think about different
modes of causation. There does seem to be a rough-and-ready intuitive difference between the three
kinds of causation, and this is all Barrett needs (note that our own argument will not depend on this
distinction).
beings, e.g., healing a person or striking him with disease), or psychosocially
(influencing psychological states, e.g., relieving my pain, giving me the strength
to face an ordeal, making someone fall in love with me). Past research has established that believers intuitively conceive of God as being located in some distant
place (viz., Heaven), even if their official theology dictates otherwise (Barrett and
Keil 1996). Furthermore, believers know from experience that normal social
actors are bad at mechanical ‘action at a distance’, whereas they are good at ‘affecting psychological states […] at a distance’ (Barrett 2001: 260). Because religious
believers imagine God as a ‘human-like agent far away’ (ibid.), they think He
can be expected to act psychosocially rather than mechanically, thus ignoring the
doctrine of divine omnipotence in practice. Indeed, in a series of experiments
with Protestant subjects, Barrett found a praying preference for psychosocial
over mechanical or biological acts. Subjects were presented with a number of fictitious scenarios describing a troublesome predicament in which divine help would
be welcome. For each scenario, they were presented with a mechanistic, a psychological and a biological solution, and asked to rate how likely they would pray for
that particular solution. Barrett found that subjects preferred the psychological (M
= 5.77) solution over either the biological (M = 4.93) or mechanistic one (M = 4.23),
with a significance level of 0.001.
Barrett correctly points out that psychosocial action is less constrained in the
sense that it does not require physical contact, and that even the intuitions of
young infants are sensitive to this fact (Spelke, Phillips and Woodward 1995;
Woodward, Phillips and Spelke 1993). However, psychosocial action reaches its
own limits at distances not far beyond those of mechanical action. Leaving aside
modern telecommunication technology, psychosocial action by way of speech
and body language is limited to a few (tens of) metres. Admittedly, some
methods exist for extending the radius of psychosocial action – waving from a distance, sending a courier, emitting smoke signals – but these are limited in speed and
efficiency. Similar extensions are available for physical and biological action as well,
e.g., throwing a missile, sending a drug or poison. At small and medium distances,
psychosocial action is very efficient indeed, but beyond that point it soon reaches
limits comparable to those of mechanical action (which, of course, is related to
the fact that psychosocial action is really a special case of mechanical action). In
other words, at great distance, where God presumably resides, a normal social
actor would not be any more efficient in effecting psychosocial action than
mechanical action. On the other hand, we already possess indirect evidence that
people can conceive of psychosocial action at a large distance. After all, prayer
typically consists of a silent mental act directed at God. If people believe that
God listens to their prayers, then they believe that God can be reached by purely
psychosocial means. Maybe people just expect that God will return psychosocial
requests with psychosocial actions?
The question remains whether, as Barrett supposes, mechanical action at a large
distance strains our causal intuitions more than psychosocial action does, and is
therefore intuitively less preferable. Although theoretically plausible, we think
this hypothesis sits uncomfortably with the available empirical data on religious
prayer practice and belief in supernatural causation. As for Christianity, among
the most common reasons for prayer are health issues (Schmied 2007; ap Siôn
2009), and Christian believers all over the world are firmly convinced that God
can answer prayers by effecting a miraculous healing – a belief that has sometimes
met with dire consequences (Peters 2008).6 According to a 2004 survey by the
National Center for Health Statistics (Barnes et al. 2004), 43 percent of the American
adult population had prayed for their own health in the previous year. As is well
known, the official procedure for beatification in the Roman Catholic Church
requires a miraculous healing ‘from beyond the grave’.7 The reliability of such
miracle reports has stirred controversy for centuries (Dawkins 2006; Hume 2000
[1748]; Peters 2008), and ever since Francis Galton sparked the great prayergauge debate at the end of the 19th century (Galton 1872; Mullin 2008; Park 2008;
Zaleski and Zaleski 2005), the alleged therapeutic effects of petitionary prayer
have received attention from medical researchers (for a recent example, see
Benson et al. [2006]), and even the effect of prayer on plant growth has been investigated (for an overview, see Francis and Evans [1995]).
Belief in supernatural causation of a biological and mechanical sort is a recurrent
feature of religions across the world, as is the practice of appeasing, petitioning and
asking favours from supernatural beings (Zaleski and Zaleski 2005). In his worldwide survey of 186 different cultures, Murdock (1980) reports that, in every single
one of them, illness and misfortune are attributed to the actions of supernatural
beings. Typical requests for non-psychosocial action include praying – or performing rituals – for rainfall or good harvest, for averting natural disasters, for protection on the battlefield, for pregnancy, etc. This solid tradition of mechanical and
biological interventions is also reflected in virtually all religious scriptures, where
supernatural beings are portrayed as capable of performing all kinds of nonpsychological feats (next to psychosocial ones). Many examples from the Old
and New Testaments are well-known: God parting the Red Sea; tearing down
the walls of Jericho; appearing in a burning bush; healing King Hezekiah and the
prophetess Miriam; and of course, impregnating a virgin and physically coming
down to earth as Jesus.
In sum, this pervasiveness of non-psychosocial forms of divine intervention is
problematic for Barrett’s (2001) claim that people find such actions too counterintuitive and that therefore they intuitively expect forms of psychosocial action from
God.
The plausibility of supernatural causation
Is it plausible that people prefer one type of supernatural causation over another, as
Barrett suggests? Research has shown that believers do not show any particular
interest in the causal mechanisms by which supernatural beings effect changes in
our world, and instead like to focus on the motivations and intentions of these entities (Boyer and Bergstrom 2008: 121). But there may be other ways in which
6
It might be argued that people think of disease as a psychosocial affliction, e.g., possession by an evil
spirit. Although this may apply in particular cases, it certainly does not work as a general solution.
Nowadays in contrast to pre-scientific times, religious believers are often well aware of the biological
nature of their illness (e.g., tumor, infection), but that does not stop some of them from praying to
God and attributing their healing to supernatural intervention. In any case, the psychologisation of
supernatural causation does not work at all in the examples of straightforward physical causation
that we will discuss next.
7
The alleged miraculous healing from beyond the grave (by the candidate saint) has to be investigated by
the Consulta Medica, a board of physicians appointed by the Vatican, to determine whether the recovery
was sudden and permanent, and to rule out scientific explanations for the healing.
believers develop tacit preferences for certain modes of supernatural causation. In
particular, both cognitive and external constraints may influence the formation and
dissemination of religious representations. Researchers in the theological incorrectness framework have been mainly occupied with the ways in which ordinary
cognition drives people away from theologically correct doctrines, but they have
paid relatively little attention to the way in which external factors, relating to the
regularities and vicissitudes of the natural world, can effect similar constraints.
In his book on theological incorrectness, D. Jason Slone even writes that CSR
researchers should not be much concerned with whether religious representations
‘refer to external realities’:
The content-claims of religions are peripheral to the actual object of study in the
cognitive science of religion. […] Whether or not gods exist makes little or no
difference at all to the study of brain mechanisms that are involved in the production of religious thought and the performance of religious actions. (Slone
2004: 47)
Slone is right that external reality does not affect the innate brain mechanisms
responsible for religious beliefs (although of course it does so indirectly via the
mechanism of natural selection), but we think it is self-evident that external
reality must in some way influence the specific representations that these cognitive
mechanisms give rise to. If we want to develop a realistic epidemiological model of
(religious) representations (Sperber 1996), we have to take into account both our
cognitive architecture and the external stimuli on the basis of which our cognitive
apparatus is operating.
In the case of petitionary prayer, our epidemiology of representations must be
informed by the relevant scientific knowledge on supernatural causation, in particular that there is no convincing evidence for the efficacy of petitionary prayer
or other forms of supernatural intervention in the natural world (mechanistic,
psychological or otherwise). The most extensive and careful studies of petitionary
prayer have not shown statistically significant benefits of petitionary prayer
(Benson et al. 2006; Hines 2003: 378–381; Matthews, Conti and Christ 2000; Park
2008).8 If we lived in a world where prayers were regularly answered (or some
prayers, or maybe only those of some religious creeds), this would clearly make
a difference on the formation and dissemination of prayer practices and beliefs.
For example, if the prayers of a certain religious creed were to work reliably for
curing disease, we could imagine the news to spread like wildfire, and surely
that religion would rapidly win new converts. There is no historical evidence for
the existence of such a religious tradition. In light of the lack of scientific and
historical evidence for the efficacy of prayer, let us therefore assume the null
hypothesis, viz., soliciting the help of supernatural beings for bringing about
natural effects is never efficacious. Even if one wants to leave the door open for
supernatural causation, one should at least acknowledge that, for most religious
believers, the events following prayer are not a simple function of the desires
expressed through it.
8
In addition, supernatural causation engenders a number of philosophical problems. For example, Fales
(2010) has recently argued that ‘theo-mundane’ causation can only be accepted at the cost of revising
foundational scientific principles such as the law of energy conservation.
To see how this is bound to affect the pattern of prayer beliefs and practices, consider the following scenario.9 Suppose I am cast up on a desert island with no food,
no drinking water and no prospect for help. I know that ships pass by occasionally,
but I have no idea when the next ship is due. If I direct a prayer to God and ask Him
to materialise food and water before my eyes, I will wind up being disappointed.
By contrast, if I pray to God to grant me the strength to endure my ordeal until the
next ship passes by, my predicament is a little different. If indeed I manage to
survive until the next ship comes by, I might be tempted to attribute my rescue
to God. We propose that people prefer the latter form of prayer not because of
the psychosocial nature of the request, but rather because the effects asked for
are all but indistinguishable from a natural course of events (i.e., from the range
of possible outcomes that are likely to occur on a purely natural account). Note
that the two characterisations need not concur. If I pray for rainfall (for drinking
water) or for a ship to come by, I am clearly requesting physical acts from God,
but this time of a far more subtle sort than in the case of food materialisation.10
Maybe clouds were already packing together, and a ship might already have
been on its course to my island. In these cases, no less than in the psychosocial
example, it is impossible to distinguish divine action from the contingent and
natural unfolding of events. Has God really intervened on my behalf, for
example by subtly steering the ship’s course, or influencing ocean currents, or
manipulating the captain into taking a different route? There is no way to ascertain
this, as there is no way to know for sure whether I would in any case have survived
a few days without food.
Subtle divine action
While the examples offered above (rainfall, the passing of a ship, perseverance)
involve events that are indistinguishable from the natural course of events, it is
important to note that such events are not guaranteed to take place in nature’s
normal course. It would be strange to pray for an outcome that can be reliably
expected to occur in any case, even if that would involve supernatural intervention
of a sort that is perfectly indistinguishable from the course of nature. For example, I
will not pray to God to make objects fall to the floor when I drop them, because I
can reliably expect gravity to do the job. In other words, if the event prayed for is
certain to take place regardless, why bother praying? In the general discussion of
his prayer study, Barrett (2001: 268) suggests that, in addition to psychological causation, people may also prefer modes of divine action that are ‘ambiguous’ (see also
Barrett and Lanman 2008: 116). The point is echoed by Hood, Hill and Spilka (2009:
47) in their discussion of religious attribution: ‘situations involving high ambiguity
and high threat may have the greatest likelihood of calling forth religious explanations’. This in turn is reminiscent of Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous observation
that the Trobriand Islanders make more extensive use of magical ritual in situations
involving higher uncertainty and unpredictability:
9
This scenario is similar to one that has been used in Barrett’s experiment (Barrett 2001: 261).
Note that a ship is normally navigated by a captain, so that its course may be construed as a function of
the captain’s psychological states, and God as psychologically influencing the captain. But we can as well
imagine God to cause a deserted raft to be washed ashore.
10
While in the villages on the inner lagoon fishing is done in an easy and absolutely
reliable manner by the method of poisoning, yielding abundant results without
danger and uncertainty, there are on the shores of the open sea dangerous modes
of fishing and also certain types in which the yield greatly varies according to
whether shoals of fish appear beforehand or not. It is most significant that in the
lagoon fishing, where man can rely completely on his knowledge and skill,
magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty,
there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results. (Malinowski 1992
[1925]: 30–31)
The notion of causal ambiguity is an important one, but it needs to be explicated
more clearly. For example, while Barrett contrasts ambiguous causation with
forms of ‘mechanistic causation’, we think that mechanistic causation can be
effected in ambiguous ways as well. We can distinguish at least three kinds of
settings in which supernatural causality is rendered subtle and unascertainable:
. Supernatural agents may interfere with or manipulate complex, stochastic
processes in which causal relations are practically impossible to assess,
e.g., weather phenomena, natural disasters, luck on a battlefield, success in
chance and sport games.
. They may influence natural processes that are either invisible or difficult to
observe directly, and whose causal determinants are poorly understood, e.g.,
being cured from or stricken with disease, conceiving a child.11
. They may act as partial causes in conjunction with natural causes (Lupfer, Tolliver and Jackson 1996: 388–389), in a way that makes it difficult to disentangle
the respective contributions, e.g., giving me the strength to win a duel, helping
me finish an exam, supporting a bridge that is on the brink of collapse.
In all these cases, we have no full epistemic access to the causal relations and antecedents responsible for the effect, which allows our minds to (partly) attribute the
events to supernatural agency. To put it in another way, explanations in terms of
supernatural causation are parasitic upon types of events whose natural occurrence
is uncertain and whose nexus of causal antecedents is not fully transparent, i.e., not
open to epistemic access. Note that, although the supernatural mode of action may be
subtle and unascertainable, this does not mean that the alleged effect attributed to
supernatural intervention is unimpressive. For example, recovery from a lethal
disease or rainfall for the crops are quite tangible and spectacular results for the
people who benefit from them. In general, it is well known that many religious
believers show no hesitation in attributing spectacular natural disasters (or the
averting thereof) to supernatural intervention.
When Pope John Paul II was shot and severely wounded in an assassination
attempt in 1981, he believed that the ‘motherly hand’ of Our Lady of Fátima
‘guided the bullet’s path’, enabling the pope to stop ‘at the threshold of death’
(Stanley 2000). Any form of robust physical or biological intervention would
11
Note that there is partial overlap between (i) and (ii). Although the causal determinants of pregnancy
and illness are partly stochastic, there are also tractable causal factors that may simply be poorly understood (in the case of pregnancy: infertile periods, means and frequency of intercourse, natural fertility; in
the case of illness: malnutrition, contact with infected persons, genetic disposition). The difference
between both categories is one of degree: weather phenomena and chance games are more stochastic
than impregnation or illness, and hence less epistemically accessible.
have sufficed to protect the pope, but the Virgin Mary allegedly interfered in this
particular, subtle way: not by preventing the gunman to shoot in the first place,
or by directing the bullet away from the pope’s body altogether, but by steering
its course ever so slightly so that he, though severely hurt, just managed to
survive the assassination attempt.
Similarly, people have no difficulties with praying for biological interventions
per se, such as curing from arthritis or cancer, but they are unlikely to pray for
an amputated limb to grow back. Likewise, praying for rainfall to ensure good
harvest seems an acceptable praying habit, but asking God to materialise fullgrown crops before your very eyes seems a little unusual, even if God is omnipotent. The point is summoned well in Le Jardin d’Épicure by Anatole France (France
1900: 204), in which the French writer visits Lourdes with a companion who, upon
seeing all the braces and crutches hanging there as evidence of healing, remarks:
‘A single wooden leg would have been quite more convincing.’12
By its very nature, psychosocial causation (e.g., possessing courage or mental
strength, being relieved from anger or depression, etc.) is typically more complex
and less transparent compared with many forms of biological and physical causation. For that reason, it is plausible that the ‘preference’ for subtle modes of causation often translates into requests for psychosocial causation, as Barrett’s research
suggests. However, whereas Barrett’s (2001) account entails that forms of biological
and physical causation are counterintuitive in general and hence less preferred, our
hypothesis predicts that people have no cognitive difficulty in conceiving such acts
and hence are not hesitant to request them, provided that their mode of causality
takes on subtle and unascertainable forms. Note that, while we argue that people
regularly pray for supernatural interventions that de facto involve physical and
biological causation, we do not claim that people bother to make a mental representation of the precise modus operandi, either when making their requests (through
prayer or ritual) or when attributing some subsequent event to a supernatural
actor answering their prayer. As Boyer and Bergstrom wrote, people are less
interested in the precise causal mechanisms of supernatural intervention than
they are in its effects and in the agents responsible for them:
People assume that the ancestors or gods are involved in various occurrences (bad
crops, illness, death, etc.) but generally do not bother to represent in what way
they bring about those states of affairs. (Boyer and Bergstrom 2008: 121)
For example, Roman Catholics have elaborate beliefs about the intercessory
capacities and responsibilities of different patron saints (i.e., the specialisations of
the saints concerning occupational hazards, particular nationalities, ethnic or
social groups and particular illnesses and afflictions), but they do not bother to represent the specific causal mechanisms employed by their protectors.13 Often, a
superficial similarity to something in the saint’s life seems to suffice (e.g., Veronica
12
In French, the quote reads: ‘Une seule jambe de bois en dirait bien davantage.’ The remark is often wrongly
attributed to Anatole France himself, who in fact disagreed with his companion and insisted that a
wooden leg would not have impressed him any more than a crutch.
13
An agent need not even be involved in the causal chain of supernatural beliefs, as is witnessed by the
various superstitious and magical beliefs in various cultures (see, e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937]: 82–
83). For example, it is completely unclear how placing a horseshoe above the doorway could bring about
luck or misfortune, but this does not seem to stop people from finding such causal beliefs perfectly credible (Slone 2004: 103–120).
who allegedly wiped Jesus’ face as he bore the cross to Golgotha became patron
saint of photographers). This lack of interest in causal understanding aligns well
with the idea developed by Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer that religious explanations are ‘relevant mysteries’ (Boyer 2001: 14; Sperber 1996: 73): they do not so
much explain events in terms of more simple and familiar processes, but instead
they make use of salient and evocative mysteries. In particular, religious beliefs
are psychologically satisfying because they allow people to attribute natural occurrences to agents, and to explain them in terms of their folk psychology (motivations
and intentions) – such explanations give a feeling of epistemic satisfaction, even if
they are superficial (Wegner 2003).
The psychology of supernatural causation
How does this preference for subtle divine action develop and play out psychologically? Janssen, De Hart and Den Draak (1990) and Barrett (2004) have drawn
attention to the rather indeterminate and abstract way in which religious people
often describe the effects of their prayers (support, blessing, trust, etc.), standing
in stark contrast to the concrete needs which typically occasion their soliciting
(e.g., serious illness). An interesting suggestion for this discrepancy is hinted at
by Janssen et al., but not further developed in their paper: ‘It could be argued
that people adapt the intended effects to the experienced effects, accepting a principal discrepancy between needs and effects’ (Janssen, De Hart and Den Draak
1990: 105). Indeed, even if the intended effect of my prayer is something like
sudden and full recovery from illness, it is plausible that people will eventually
lower their expectations. For example, people could still pray for eventual recovery
while accepting a longer period of illness, or they could resign to their predicament
and ask God to support them psychologically. Consider the famous Serenity
prayer written by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:
God grant me the serenity / To accept the things I cannot change / Courage to
change the things I can / And wisdom to know the difference.
Instead of asking God to bring about a certain state of affairs directly, I ask him to
influence my psychological attitude regarding my predicament. As we argued
above, this mode of action (condition (iii), as a partial cause cooperating to a
natural effect) is more difficult to ascertain than straightforward intervention on
God’s part. Moreover, note that the very structure of the Serenity prayer can accommodate a certain amount of failure. If I succeed in changing whatever it is that I
wanted to change, this is because God granted me the courage to do so. On the
other hand, if I fail to change whatever it is that I tried to change and eventually
I have to give up, this is because God granted me the serenity to realise that I
could not change it anyway (and, of course, to know the difference).
In general, religious believers who request supernatural interventions that are
subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events, will have a better
chance of finding themselves in a situation in which they can attribute the events
in question to God answering their prayers. A better chance, that is, compared
with those who expect divine firework displays, in the sense of manifest violations
of the natural order. As Nicholas Humphrey wrote, people must have known all
along that full-fledged and palpable miracles just don’t happen: ‘They must have
known these sobering truths because time and again they and their fellow
human beings must have come slap up against the evidence for them’ (Humphrey
1995: 54). It seems reasonable to expect that people adapt their wishes and expectations to such sobering experiences, and that they won’t keep praying for unambiguous and robust supernatural acts if the results are invariably disappointing.
In other words, such a process of psychological self-correction will steer believers
away from demanding divine acts of a robust kind, instead fostering a psychological preference for modes of action that are ambiguous and less vulnerable to
clear refutation (Boudry and Braeckman in press).
This is not to say that religious believers who have ‘learnt’ not to pray for robust
divine action will never find themselves in a situation in which their prayers remain
apparently ‘unanswered’. If we maintain the null hypothesis on the efficacy of
prayer, even prayers for subtle modes of divine action will appear to be answered
at most occasionally.14 Indeed, the history of prayer itself bears witness to the
simmering doubts about its efficacy, as Zaleski and Zaleski noted:
the sheer abundance of devout tracts exhorting the faithful to pray often, pray fervently, and pray with confidence in achieving desired results suggests that belief
in the efficacy of prayer has always needed some degree of shoring up (Zaleski
and Zaleski 2005: 333).
The frequency of apparent confirmation will depend on the probability function of
the event type in question (e.g., spontaneous remission of a disease, rainfall after a
drought), but in any case, psychological research has established that beliefs may
become entrenched even on the basis of a small number of apparent confirmations.
People are prone to confirmation bias (Nickerson 1998), which means that they pay
attention to and remember confirmations of a favoured hypothesis, while they
quickly discard or explain away adverse evidence. More specifically, the psychological literature on cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning (Aronson
1992; Kunda 1990; Tavris and Aronson 2008) suggests that, when firmly held
beliefs are confronted with apparent failure, people rely on a repertoire of rationalisations. As Barrett noted in a later discussion of his prayer study (Barrett 2004), the
whole idea of addressing a request to a whimsical or possibly reluctant supernatural agent suggests some ways of accommodating failure: ‘Prayer commonly
assumes the possibility that a request could be approved, denied, or put off until
a later date’ (Barrett 2004: 71). In such a setting, a prayer that appears to have
failed may in fact be granted ‘on a different timetable’ or just be denied for some
good reason that we mortals cannot fathom. In this way, as Barrett (2001: 74)
notes: ‘Negative evidence rarely threatens belief in God.’ Other rationales are possible for occasional failure: ‘My prayer did not fit into God’s plan’ – ‘Too much
answered prayers would spoil us’ – ‘My praying ritual was not performed correctly’ – ‘The purpose of prayer is ‘to construct the soul, not to instruct God”
(Augustine)15 – ‘God cannot be coerced through prayer’ (for a related discussion,
see Martin [2004: 118–121]). If believers are highly committed to their faith, we
can expect them to be motivated to maintain belief in the goodness and
14
Of course, religious believers themselves need not entertain something like the null hypothesis. All we
mean to say is that a certain state of affairs (the inefficacy of prayer) acts as a constraint on belief formation. The null hypothesis is just a way to describe that state of affairs.
15
’ut ipsa [man] construatur, non ut Deus instruatur’ (Augustine 1872/73: Epistola CXL, caput XXIX, 69).
omnipotence of God (e.g., Kushner [1981]), and to explain failure by what EvansPritchard has termed ‘secondary elaborations’ (see below).16
The persistence of the confirmation bias ensures that even a small number of
apparent successes may succeed in outweighing the instances of apparent failure
(Barrett 2004: 74). In the case of prayers for robust divine action, however, there
is little or no room for apparent confirmations. Thus, if we confine ourselves to
personal experiences regarding the efficacy of prayer, the point is not that disappointment and cognitive dissonance will never arise for those who prefer subtle
modes of action on God’s part, but that those who demand robust actions will
always encounter failures that occasion the need for some rationalisation, and
will never encounter occasional personal successes to compensate for the failures.
The confirmation bias needs some events to be biased towards.
Causal intuitions and folk physics
Besides this form of psychological adjustment, one may argue that there are purely
cognitive factors at play in the preference for subtle modes of causation. Research in
developmental psychology suggests that, from early infancy, humans possess an
intuitive core knowledge about spatio-temporal objects, which is sometimes designated as folk physics. Looking-time experiments with children reveals a number of
such implicit assumptions: (1) objects move as bounded and discrete wholes (cohesion principle); (2) objects move along continuous and connected paths (continuity
principle); and (3) objects do not interact at a distance (contact principle) (Spelke
1994; Spelke and Kinzler 2007). It is not surprising that natural selection has
endowed us with an intuitive grasp of these basic spatio-temporal principles,
because they are apparent in the physical environment on which our ancestors
depended for survival, at least at the scale of medium-sized objects.
Is it plausible that people dislike robust forms of supernatural causation simply
because these violate deeply engrained causal intuitions and folk physics? For
example, the instant materialisation or displacement of desired objects before my
very eyes would violate the principle of continuity. Or, to give another example,
if a physical obstacle were to suddenly disintegrate as a result of my prayer to
remove it, this would surely violate the principle of cohesion. The problem with
this argument is that precisely such breaches in the fabric of our natural world
by supernatural agents often form the subject of religious narratives, legends,
and holy writ. The Biblical stories about a burning bush not being consumed by
the flames, or about Jesus walking on water are clearly violations of the basic
principles of folk physics. Furthermore, many religious traditions contain stories
that seem to exploit violations of precisely such intuitive principles as mentioned
above. For example, Christian monks and saints are often believed to possess the
ability of bilocation, i.e., being physically present at two different places at the
same time, thus violating the principles of cohesion and continuity (Nickell 1993:
216–219). Similar stories are to be found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Neo-paganism,
shamanism and many other religious traditions. Likewise, popular stories about
16
In the wake of scientific evidence on the inefficacy of prayer, many liberal theologians have relinquished the idea of divine interventions in the natural world altogether. Notably, since the prayergauge debate in the 19th century, theologians have begun reinterpreting the value of prayer on a
purely moral and spiritual level, purging it from any form of miraculous interventionism (Mullin 2008).
psychokinesis and action at a distance in religion and magic clearly violate the
contact principle. Examples from the Christian tradition include Jesus transforming
water into wine, calming a storm on a boat with his frightened disciples, or cursing
a fig tree and causing it to wither away.17
If the preference for subtle supernatural causation stemmed from the fact that
robust causation violates causal intuitions and folk physics, we should expect to
find the same cognitive bias in religious mythology and legends. What we find,
however, is that firework displays by God are pervasive in distant hearsay and religious mythology, whereas they are hardly ever the subject of personal experience
or first-person eyewitness testimony (see also for example Evans-Pritchard 1965
[1937]: 195–201). How religious believers make sense of this discrepancy is itself
an interesting empirical question: maybe they believe that robust supernatural
events befall only very exceptional people, or are confined to holy history, or that
they no longer occur because of the lack of faith in modern times. In any case, it
seems that the preference for subtle and ambiguous divine action in petitionary
prayer cannot simply result from the constraints of causal intuitions.
The cultural transmission of prayer practices
Up to this point, we have described the formation of prayer beliefs and practices on
the level of individual psychological mechanisms. We can now take this approach
one step further and outline the ways in which larger cultural trends may emerge
from these psychological processes and intuitions. In Dan Sperber’s epidemiological model of culture (Sperber 1990; 1996), which has had a formative influence
on CSR, our shared cognitive make-up provides constraints through which the
dissemination of representations is channelled. Small selection pressures in the
transmission of beliefs, aggregated over many transmissions, will give rise to
larger cultural trends. Lienard and Boyer (2006) and McCauley and Lawson
(2002) have applied this approach to religious rituals, and we can now apply it
to belief patterns about supernatural causation. Assuming that the facts of nature
are the same for all, it is reasonable to expect that the disillusion with robust
modes of divine causation will become part of the collective experience of religious
communities (see also Barrett [2004: 70–74]). Belief in the present-day feasibility
and reliability of robust supernatural deeds, as opposed to distant hearsay and
historical narratives, are unlikely to thrive if they are to compete with beliefs in
subtle divine causation.
There are several modes of cultural transmission in which representations about
supernatural causation may be passed on and disseminated in a religious community. Cultural transmission can be conceptualised as a flow of information between
or within generations: horizontal, oblique or vertical cultural transmission.
. vertical transmission (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981): children are initiated
in prayer and other religious practices by their parents;
17
Researchers in CSR have argued that religious representations are successful precisely because they
violate intuitive expectations about the ontological categories to which they belong. To be more
precise, religious representations have to be ‘minimally counterintuitive’ (Atran 2002; Boyer 1994) to
be more memorable, which means that they display a small number of violations against a background
of intuitively expected properties.
. oblique transmission (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981): this is similar to
vertical transmission, though in this case learners do not acquire information
about supernatural beings from their parents but from any member of the
older generation (older family members, elders, priests);
. horizontal transmission (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981): people of the same
generation acquire prayer practices from each other.
On another level, cultural selection can be modelled in terms of biases that underlie
the transmission between people:
. conformist bias (Henrich and Boyd 1998): members of a religious community
tend to adopt the notions on supernatural causation that are most commonly
held within that community;
. prestige bias (Henrich and Gil-White 2001): (candidate) members of a religious
community adopt particular ideas on supernatural agency because of the
(perceived) prestige of some of that community’s affiliates holding such ideas.
Religious representations being transmitted may include: (1) assumptions about
the things believers may reasonably expect from supernatural beings; (2) implicit
conceptions regarding the modus operandi of supernatural beings; (3) historical
narratives and received accounts of answered prayers, constituting templates for
future interaction with supernatural beings; and (4) explicit theological solutions
for why supernatural beings act in certain ways but not in others. Obviously, as
Sperber and Claidière (2008) observe, all learning is biased by content. In this
case, it is not unlikely that the cultural transmission of prayer practices and
individual experiences with prayer interact to favour beliefs in subtle and unascertainable modes of supernatural causation.
This general outline of pathways of cultural assimilation, which is based on
theoretical models of cultural transmission, leaves many questions unanswered.
In the context of this paper, however, we merely want to draw attention to the
point that not every member of a religious community need go through the
same stages of personal disappointment of the kind described by Humphrey
above. By means of explicit or implicit religious instruction, cultural selection
forces may supplement and reinforce intrapersonal selection to the same effect.
To put it bluntly, I may refrain from asking spectacular displays by God either
because I have myself experienced the disappointment following such requests,
or because others have instructed me not to make them. For instance, theoretical
modelling (Henrich and Boyd 1998) indicates that conformism is an adaptive strategy in a broad range of ecological circumstances: it is often advantageous to adopt a
culturally transmitted trait (such as refraining from eating certain mushrooms)
without attempting to verify the quality of the acquired cultural trait (e.g., trying
out the mushroom anyway and becoming violently ill). A similar mechanism
may be at work in the social transmission of petitionary prayer: one learns from
one’s parents, elders or peers that it is no use asking for the regeneration of lost
limbs or the appearance of food out of nowhere.
To illustrate this effect of accumulated experience on religious beliefs, consider a
second study by Barrett, in which he uses the same scenarios but substituted God
with a ‘comparably endowed super-agent’ (Barrett 2001: 264). Subjects were asked
to consider a futuristic supercomputer (Uncomp) with comparable God-like
powers, but ‘components physically located all over the earth’. The term
‘praying’ was replaced by ‘asking for’. Barrett found that subjects in the Uncomp
group did not have any preference for either mode of action and explains this in
terms of the non-locality of Uncomp. Our account suggests a different explanation:
subjects had no experience with the fictitious Uncomp, whereas of course practising believers had plenty of experience with and culturally transmitted ideas about
directing prayers to God. Whereas religious believers have had ample opportunity
to adjust their conception of God’s modus operandi on the basis of experience, and
have also been exposed to a long tradition of religious believers with similar experiences, none of this holds for Uncomp. A futuristic computer with God-like powers
is simply a fictitious character invented by the experimenter, which, from the
perspective of Protestant believers, is quite different from God. Thus, subjects
have no reasons not to accept the stipulated omnipotence of Uncomp at face
value, which explains their relative lack of preference for either mode of action.18
Note that there may be still other ways in which certain praying practices (or patterns of belief) may be conducive to a process of self-validation, and thus possess an
‘advantage’ in terms of cultural dissemination. First, belief in the biological healing
powers of supernatural beings may achieve cultural success in virtue of the fact that
genuine faith on the part of the person afflicted may engender a placebo effect, the
result of which may afterwards be attributed to God’s help. Second, if I pray to God
to give me the strength to face a difficult ordeal, my act of praying and my faith in
God may increase my self-confidence and reduce stress levels, resulting in a form of
self-fulfilling prophecy. In addition, we have to take into account a self-validating
selection effect regarding the people who, other things being equal, are still around
to recount their miraculous healing or rescue, as Nicholas Humphrey’s Law of the
Efficacy of Prayer makes clear: ‘In a dangerous world there will always be more
people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than
those whose prayers have not.’19
Different religious traditions
Thus far, we have mainly focused on the Christian tradition, describing how the
psychology of supernatural causation plays out in the practice of petitionary
prayer directed to a single divine being. In cultures with very different supernatural beliefs and religious practices, however, we might expect to find similar preferences for subtle modes of action. An interesting case study is provided by EvansPritchard’s (1965 [1937]) landmark anthropological investigation of magic and
witchcraft among the Azande in Sudan. The Azande believe that some members
of their community are witches who possess the mystical power to injure and
kill other individuals, to harm their crops, to make houses collapse, etc. Indeed,
the Azande invariably attribute death, disease and other forms of misfortune to
the malignant actions of witches, thus making no distinction between different
modes of causation (psychosocial vs. biological or mechanical). As Evans-Pritchard
18
Another and even more simple explanation is that Uncomp is explicitly described as having components ‘physically located all over the earth’ (Barrett 2001: 264, our italics), whereas God presumably
is not to be thought of as a physical entity. This difference by itself may account for the greater preference
for physical causation in the Uncomp condition.
19
The ‘law’ was posted on the EDGE Question Center (2004) retrieved from http://www.edge.org/q2004/
page2.html#humphrey
noted, however, the Zande people are certainly not unaware of the natural causes
leading to such events. Interestingly, they believe that the mystical cause of
witchcraft acts through a chain of natural causes, making a subtle contribution as
a ‘co-operating cause’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937]: 72). For instance, when the
Azande attribute the collapse of a mud house to witchcraft, they know very well
that, as it happens, a colony of termites had been gnawing through the pillars of
the house and undermining its foundations. Although they accept this natural
cause of the event, they insist that only witchcraft explains why this particular
house collapsed at that particular moment. Again, we see that the actions of the
supernatural agent – in this case, a human being endowed with supernatural
powers – are believed to contribute as a partial cause to some event, which
renders the supernatural modus operandi subtle and virtually imperceptible. As
Evans-Pritchard notes: ‘The attribution of misfortune to witchcraft does not
exclude what we call its real causes but is superimposed on them and gives to
social events their moral value’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937]: 73). Why don’t
witches just make the house collapse at one stroke, instead of acting indirectly
and through the efforts of termites? On the other hand, how would the belief
that witches may destroy houses at a single stroke fare in the Zande community,
compared with the belief that they consistently employ the services of ants or
other seemingly natural causes?
Interestingly, a similar conception of indirect supernatural causation through
natural causes also appears in Christian theology, such as in the work of Thomas
Aquinas on the distinction between primary and secondary causes. According to
Aquinas, causation by God (primary causation) and natural causes (secondary
causation) operate on entirely different levels: God is the cause of all causes, the
cause of the world’s existence. He does not work apart from secondary causes, or
in addition to them (for a discussion, see Johnson [1996]). Rather, God works
through the acts of finite agents: ‘The act of being is what secondary agents [creatures] produce through the power of the primary agent [God]’ (Aquinas 1258–1264:
book 3, chapter 66, par 7).
The Azande also regularly consult oracles about the various threats of witchcraft
and about the courses of action to take in their life. In the benge, one of the most
respected Zande oracles, a poison is administered to a fowl, following a number
of elaborate preparations, and a question is put to it. The oracle is believed to
provide a yes/no answer depending on whether the animal survives or dies.
After observing a series of such divinations, Evans-Pritchard notes that there is
no foolproof way to predict whether or not the bird will die, given the amount
of poison or the size of the fowl. To all intents and purposes, the fate of the fowl
is a matter of chance.20 As we have argued before, precisely such stochastic processes, to which human beings have no epistemic access, are psychologically
optimal for imputing supernatural causation. Because it allows for regular confirmations, the oracle is conducive to self-validation, a process that is augmented by
the kinds of questions posed and the way these are typically phrased. Among the
Azande, apparent oracular failures are explained away or reinterpreted by ‘evasive
secondary elaborations’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937]: 319) that are provided for
20
The same point holds for the other oracles in the Zande belief system, the termite oracle (dakpa) and the
friction oracle (iwa) (Evans-Pritchard 1965 [1937]: 352–386).
by the belief system itself: improper preparation of the poison; the violations of
taboos; interference of witchcraft or evil magic; refusal of the oracle to give the
right answer. Elsewhere we have argued that when the causal relations in a
belief system are underspecified and the effects are ambiguous, this engenders
subtle forms of inferential circularity, rendering the belief system impervious to
adverse evidence (Boudry and Braeckman in press).
Conclusion
In many religious traditions, in particular the three monotheistic faiths, supernatural beings are conceived of as very powerful or even omnipotent agents, who
are able to act in almost any way they like. Experimental findings suggest,
however, that religious believers typically do not respect such counterintuitive
theological doctrines when they are engaged in everyday religious practice, even
though they may endorse them when explicitly questioned and when given
some time to reflect. The related concepts of theological correctness and theological
incorrectness have sparked a renewed interest in the psychology of petitionary
prayer, which is still a relatively unexplored domain. Barrett’s (2001) study on
prayer is a very welcome exception, but his account suffers from a conceptual
problem: the characteristic distance range of psychosocial as opposed to mechanistic action is largely similar, which complicates his argument about an intuitive
preference for supernatural causation of the former kind.
On an empirical level, the hypothesis defended by Barrett sits uncomfortably
with the fact that beliefs in supernatural beings acting mechanically and biologically are pervasive in the Protestant tradition he investigated, and indeed across
cultures (Johnson 2005; Murdock 1980). The account of theological incorrectness
we have put forward is informed by our best knowledge about the efficacy of
prayer (leading us to adopt the null hypothesis). Viewed in that light, we saw
that people will develop preferences for supernatural interventions that are
subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events. These different
modes of action need not be cognitively represented as such by believers – as
indeed believers do not care much about modes of supernatural action – but they
may emerge from the psychological mechanisms of self-correction and the proposed epidemiology of prayer practices.
Our account suggests that people stray from orthodox theology not only because
of the way their minds work, but also in virtue of what the world is like (and the
interaction between both). In an epidemiology of religious representations, both
our innate cognitive make-up and external reality impose selective pressure on
representations. In particular, we argued that, given that the causal structure of
our world is partly inscrutable, beliefs in subtle and unascertainable modes of
supernatural causation will be compelling and cognitively appealing because
they are more susceptible to occasional confirmation and less vulnerable to
repeated disconfirmation. Psychological mechanisms of self-correction will steer
believers away from beliefs in robust and palpable forms of divine action
(Boudry and Braeckman in press), an effect that is further enforced by cultural
transmission. Future research may extend this approach to the attribution of
supernatural agency in general (i.e., not related to prayer), for example in terms
of divine punishment and retribution for moral transgression. It will be interesting
to know whether, in such cases as well, believers are attracted to gods that move
in mysterious ways.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Johan Braeckman, Stefaan Blancke, Helen De Cruz, John
Teehan, the editors of Religion and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful
suggestions and comments, which have substantially improved the paper. This
work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and by Ghent
University [grant number COM07/PWM/001].
Maarten Boudry is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Philosophy
and Moral Sciences, Ghent University (Belgium), where he obtained his PhD
degree on the subject of pseudoscience. He also published several papers on irrationality, methodological naturalism, the demarcation problem and evolutionary
epistemology.
Johan De Smedt received his PhD in philosophy from Ghent University. His
dissertation investigated the cognitive underpinnings of human creative behavior,
examining art, religion and science. He has published extensively on these topics.
He is currently a visiting scholar on the Science and Religious Conflict Project at
Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford.
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