Why do human beings find religious ideas such an appealing explanation for events and why is supernatural attribution so ubiquitous and often more satisfying than naturalistic accounts? Jason Slone goes a long way in answering these questions and the short version is somewhat paradoxical - supernatural beliefs are a natural by-product of cognition.



For anyone read in the literature in this field, you will find many ideas that aren't new - Slone draws heavily on the ideas of Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, and Stewart Guthrie among many others. But the book isn't just rehash and regurgitation as its thesis weaves the ideas into a coherent and refreshing look into religion and how human beings interact with it, generate it, and often use it to understand the world around them.



The main thrust of the book, from which the title is derived, is that the often simple ways religious beliefs contradict or are inconsistent with each other in the minds of believers can offer a keen insight into the nature of religion. To paraphrase an example given in the book: Christians were asked if God was omnipotent and of course they gave the "theologically correct" response of yes. They then were asked about the idea in practice as such how God operates with prayer requests. Their description consisted of a "naturalized" account more in tune with intuition - that God dealt with them one at a time. The key here being that as per the professed theological doctrine, God would be capable of dealing with all prayer requests devoid of any chronological constraints. But that turned out to be inconsistent with the "online" thinking of the prompted conceptualizations. The conclusion that reverberates here is that religion is constrained by cognition, not that cognition is constrained by religion.



Another large portion of the book deals with luck beliefs and how this is related (very closely) with religious beliefs. Slone expounds how luck beliefs are related to the human propensity to attribute things to causes and how even innocuous superstitious beliefs such as uttering "Gimme sevens" before rolling dice can offer clues. He explains how these often arise from the "illusion of correlation" as well as the tendency to blur the lines between psychological and mechanical causation.



The book should definitely be on the short list of to-read for any student of religion as it is full of powerful ideas and is conveyed in a well written, conversational style.