Children and unconscious mechanisms

CSR invokes two lines of support for the theory that human reflection regarding possible extraordinary, supernatural, or ultimate causes is typically overridden or overwhelmed by prereflective mechanisms: (1) that children naturally or spontaneously incline to agential or teleological explanations for many natural phenomena; and (2) that for adults reflective “theologically correct” (or “off‐line”) ideas are typically overridden in actual religious practice by “minimally counterintuitive” (or “online”) concepts of supernatural agents.

Deborah Kelemen analyzes various studies relating to children's teleological or functional explanations for natural entities (as opposed to merely physical or mechanical explanations) and/or children's beliefs about God or other supernatural agents. She concludes that the CSR evidence indicates children are natural teleologists (indeed, “promiscuous teleologists” [Kelemen , 100–02]) and “tentatively suggests” an affirmative answer to the question of her article title, “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’?” (109). Regarding these two tendencies in children, Kelemen cites a study suggesting to her that the teleological stance and the invoking of divine intentionality in designing and creating things bear a “systematic relation” or “connection” to each other (2006, 108–09; see Kelemen and DiYanni 2005). Olivera Petrovich () goes further in holding that young children possess innate “core religious concepts,” since they overwhelmingly answer that plants and animals have been created by God. Based on the fact that very young children assume that other people perceive what they perceive even when not in a position to do so and on various experiments elaborating upon that fact, Justin L. Barrett hypothesizes that such children attribute to agents superpower (Barrett 2012, 74–77), superknowledge (82–96), and perhaps immortality (113–17). Thus, they are predisposed to believe in a monotheistic God. I will note that Barrett departs from the usual atheism of most cognitive scientists of religion who assume that theistic or teleological preconscious mechanisms or processes explain away religious belief; instead, Barrett views the alleged predisposition to believe in theism as according with the Calvinistic tradition of humans having a sensus divinitatis, or sense of the divine (see also Clark and Barrett 2011). Of course, the fly in CSR's ointment is that young children in the West have encountered the concept of God from adults before being studied by cognitive scientists. No known cases exist of children inventing on their own, de novo, a concept of a powerful supernatural agent.

Furthermore, several studies or aspects thereof (three of which Kelemen mentions), which I will unpack in the remainder of this section, raise questions about how strong the proclivity of children to invoke teleological or supernatural agential explanations actually is. Kelemen parenthetically refers to a study by Frank C. Keil with one countervailing result but does not specify nor engage that result (Kelemen , 101–02). As part of a series of experiments on categorizing life forms by children in kindergarten and Grades 2 and 4, Keil mentioned and asked questions about a “thing” that could enter a human body and cause harm. Subgroups were given alternative descriptions of the thing: (1) functional or teleological where the thing has to get inside people's bodies and use parts of their bodies, or it won't last long (Keil 1992, 123–24); (2) simple mechanical where the thing causes abrasions; (3) intentional “that directly attributes goals and desires” to the thing; (4) artifactual where a human designed the thing; or (5) finally no description at all (Keil 1992, 124–25). “Children at all ages thought that the ‘teleological’ thing did not know what it was doing any more than the mechanical one, attributing knowledge roughly three times as much to the intention/desire entity,” Keil concludes (126). This result indicates that (1) teleology/functionality does not necessarily nor always entail intentionality on any agent's part, and (2) teleological/functional explanations can sometimes be more like mechanical/physical than intentional ones. If the human propensity to ascribe intentional agency were as strong as CSR generally holds, one might expect that at least the youngest children would attribute such to the “functional/teleological” thing. After all, blaming evil spirits for disease is rather common among indigenous peoples.

I appreciate that Kelemen brought to my attention a 1932 study by Margaret Mead of children from the animistic Manus culture, through her very brief discussion of it in a footnote (Kelemen , 111, n. 1). She casts doubt on Mead's negative conclusions regarding spontaneous animistic thinking by the children, citing both the Mead study's use of drawings and of questions concerning malintentioned artifacts (specifically, an allegedly malicious canoe and pencil). This characterization does not do justice to the scope of Mead's fieldwork, which analyzed 32,000 spontaneous drawings as well as responses to ink blots and which involved observation of much interaction of children in play and conversation with both other children of varying ages and adults, including children's responses to adult explanations, severe illness, accidents, storms, cyclones, and animals. While the questioning designed to invoke animistic responses might better have focused on natural phenomena rather than human artifacts, one of the six “stimuli” does seem rather evocative: Mead identified her glass wind chimes as a ramus, the Manus term for a charm intended to cause other people to give the possessor objects she wants. Overall, despite copious opportunities to refer to supernatural agency, such references were minimal. While adult Manus typically attribute chance events to a spirit, including blaming a spirit for the loss of a small object, and attribute cyclones to an angry spirit as punishment, no child was observed doing so (Mead , 181). Only one (of 41) children spontaneously talked about ghosts, though boys have a guardian ghost assigned to them at age five or six. The boy who did talk about his guardian had suffered the death of his father two years ago, and this talk was “regarded as aberrant by his companions” (182). Though “children hear a good many reports of ghostly activity,” children identified only six of their drawings as of ghosts, and these bore “no distinguishing ghostly attributes” (183). Parents warn children that they may be eaten by tchinals, or land devils, if they go play at a “slightly distant islet.” However, children show “but slight real belief.” Children invoked tchinals in three circumstances: (1) a light‐hearted game of capture on one occasion (183); (2) labeling the result of a failed attempt to draw a human as a tchinal; and (3) adding “of a tchinal” to their description of an ink blot that bore “little resemblance to the object named” (184). The drawings identified as a tchinal never showed any of the features of a tchinal's traditional appearance (183). Finally, adult Manus believe that seeing one's reflection in fresh water will cause some of one's soul stuff to be captured by a water demon. However, because children nevertheless will look at their reflections, parents do not take children to the mainland (183).

Mead concludes that “Manus children not only show no tendency towards spontaneous animistic thought, but that they also show what may perhaps legitimately be termed a negativism towards explanations couched in animistic rather than practical cause and effect terms” (Mead , 186). Kelemen concedes that, while Mead's study might support that children are not natural animists, it does not count against her theory that children are natural theists (Kelemen , 111, n. 1). I would note that “theism” insofar as it contrasts with “animism” involves wider scope and greater abstraction: that is, gods of ancient polytheism are in charge of a whole realm like the sea or sky, while spirits are localized—I would say embodied—in the wind, rain, mountain, tree, and so forth. (though some hunting‐gathering tribes have a Lord or Lady of the Animals). Kelemen undoubtedly would have liked Mead to have asked the Manus children how something in nature got there in the first place or came to be, thus providing an opening for them to posit a creating supernatural agent. Yet nothing prevented the Manus children from spontaneously invoking a god(dess), including a Lady or Lord of the animals—wider in scope than a localized spirit or ghost—to explain chance events, illness, storms, or even how animals or humans came to be.

Mead even theorizes about why Western children are more prone to “animistic” thinking (or thinking about supernatural agents) than these children of an animistic culture. Relevant factors about Manus culture include a simple language without metaphors involving personification of natural or artifactual objects, the fact that young children learn “to make correct physical adjustments” to the environment with the consequence of failure being “severe punishment,” and the fact that (while overhearing adult religious talk and receiving warnings about tchinals) children do not hear their tribe's myths nor receive explicit religious instruction, nor do they take part in religious ceremonies. In contrast, English provides a wealth of “animistic” or personalizing metaphors, while parents share stories and poems that personify animals, forces of nature, and artifacts; the physical environment for Western children in its complexity is in many ways beyond their understanding and control; and Western children participate in religious ceremonies and receive religious instruction (Mead , 187–89) (and I would add learn beliefs and practices relating to not‐formally‐religious supernatural‐type figures like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy). Mead's research suggests that study of other tribes not influenced by Western culture or adult theistic concepts, to the extent such groups can be found, would advance CSR. To her credit, Kelemen advocates “further research” to determine how well the “description” of children as intuitive theists “really holds across individuals and cultures” (2006, 109).

E. Margaret Evans () conducted a study of three different age groups of children and their parents, from fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist communities, on belief in creationism versus evolution, as well as in spontaneous generation, to explain the genesis of species. Citing Ernst Mayr, she notes that “unlike Lamarckian evolution or creation, spontaneous generation explanations are nonteleological in that they do not directly invoke purpose or an underlying design” (Evans , 236). In the open‐ended question segment of the study, participants were asked how the first representative of the following three species came to be: an Asian sun bear, a tuatara lizard, and a human (242). This segment would be the most likely to elicit spontaneous thinking, in contrast to the closed or forced response segment. While Kelemen cites this study as supporting that children favor “creationist” accounts (Kelemen 2006, 100, 102), she does not mention the result I find the most interesting for the purposes of this article: Evans finds that among the youngest children studied, 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds, “no significant difference between creation and spontaneous generation” beliefs exist for nonfundamentalist households (2001, 246–47). As above, note that spontaneous generation is a nonteleological, indeed physical, explanation. Unless they received specific instruction—which was the case for fundamentalist households—this age group would be the least likely to be influenced by their culture. This result clearly casts some doubt on the theory that children are strong natural teleologists or intuitive theists, as does Mead's research.

Finally, in the vein of research by cognitive scientists who see young children as “intuitive scientists,” Laura E. Schultz and Jessica Sommerville conducted a series of three experiments on children between the ages of three and one‐half and five and one‐half years. These experiments involved lights and switches/buttons that acted stochastically. The issue concerned what inferences the children would make about possible unobserved causes. In their article, “God Does Not Play Dice,” which was reported in Science and Theology News (Orem 2006), the experimenters conclude that young children are parsimonious in making inferences about unobserved causes and that they infer deterministic physical causes much more often than they infer chance (which would include intervention by supernatural agents in this context) (Schultz and Sommerville 2006).

The power of “theologically incorrect” mechanisms

Another way that the CSR community emphasizes unconscious mechanisms or processes over religious reflection is the claim that theologically correct ideas are typically overridden in practice by anthropomorphic concepts of supernatural agents. As both a theologian in the academy and a pastor of Christian congregations over the years, I readily grant that “popular theology,” the theology of the people in the pews, often diverges from that of theologians, a divergence that includes greater anthropomorphism. Yet I judge that a major study by Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil () overstates the degree of unconscious anthropomorphism, thus understating the role of theological reflection. This study featured eight stories involving God, followed by a series of questions. In order to control for several variables, they ran three variations of the study, the first two including several subgroups. I find wording and structural problems in most of the stories. The authors mention that one interpretation of why subjects miss, or anthropomorphize, is that questions may entail the following: “The God items may just be more subtle, not because of the presence of an anthropomorphic God concept, but because the items emphasize very slight distinctions” (Barrett and Keil , 127). A “yes” answer to the following questions was scored as theologically incorrect anthropomorphizing. (1) “God was pleased by seeing the girl put the bird in its nest.” (Actual wording: “God was aware of the girl's deed and was pleased by it.”) (143) (2) “God heard the woman's prayer and helped her.” (Actual wording: “God responded” [to the woman's prayer and helped her].) (144) Such scoring strikes me as too picky, by assuming that “yes” answers meant the subjects took “seeing” and “hearing” literally as applied to God. Yet even as people sometimes say “I see” a point meaning “I know,” so subjects may have understood “see” in that sense. Believers frequently speak of God “hearing” prayers, indeed hearing all prayers, just as much when the prayers are silent as when spoken out loud. I believe that some incorrect answers on that item came from subjects who did not interpret “hearing” as entailing physical hearing. Moreover, the wording of at least three of the other stories themselves involve anthropomorphizing if taken literally: God “was listening,” “was looking,” “watched,” and “enjoyed the smell” (this last one from a fourth story is admittedly ambiguous; in my theology, one would avoid simply saying “God enjoyed the smell” as if God had an olfactory system of God's own, instead holding that God experienced the enjoyment by the chef and his customers of the smell) (127, 137).

The authors also suggest another interpretation of why subjects may miss questions by anthropomorphizing God: “the context of the story” (Barrett and Keil , 127). I believe some contextualization in the stories does indeed lead to a higher incidence of incorrect answers. Besides the just‐mentioned anthropomorphic wording, some of the wording and structure relating to time appear to prejudice subjects towards anthropomorphizing. Many of the stories concern whether God can do two activities at once or whether God's awareness of one event can be compromised by an intervening event. Two stories state that “God finished listening to the birds” and “looking at the rock,” respectively (137, my emphasis). Such wording contradicts divine omniscience: an all‐knowing God would not “finish listening” to the birds unless and until the birds finished singing and would continue being aware of the state of the rock. This theologically incorrect, anthropomorphic wording could increase the likelihood that subjects would answer that God could not “hear” the birds when a loud jet flew by and that a cattle stampede obscured the state of the rock for a time. In another story, while helping an angel work on a crossword puzzle, God responds to the prayer of a woman lost in a forest by comforting and showing her a path out. The story closes with the sentence, “God helped the angel finish the crossword puzzle” (143). Putting that sentence at the end, without any reference to God continuing to help the angel in the middle of the story (which of course would be theologically correct) may in itself prejudice some subjects to anthropomorphize. A more obvious problem exists in relation to this story. A “yes” answer to the following question is scored as theologically incorrect: “After answering the woman's prayer, God finished helping the angel work on the crossword puzzle” (143). Assuming that God is omnitemporal rather than strictly atemporal with respect to experiencing the world (which probably characterizes most contemporary academic theology as well as popular theology), the statement is theologically correct under the following scenario, a scenario quite compatible with the story: God continues to help the angel work the crossword while helping the woman and then finishes helping the angel after helping the woman. Finally, a story about a boy apparently in danger of drowning when his leg got caught while swimming appears to rather blatantly “lead the witnesses,” that is, bias the subjects with the following wording: “Though God was answering another prayer in another part of the world when the boy started praying, before long God responded” (137, my emphasis). A theologically correct storyteller would never use the word “though,” because it is both irrelevant and inappropriate with respect to a God unlimited in scope of interaction. In conjunction with “though,” the words “before long” further prejudice subjects to limit God to one activity at a time.

As I began my consideration of Barrett and Keil's study, I conceded that some anthropomorphism happens in popular theology. I readily concede that their study supports the existence of some theologically incorrect anthropomorphism in their subjects. However, given the above flaws in their study, I conclude that they overestimate the influence of prereflective processes and mechanisms in religious belief, even as they underestimate that of religious reflection. Barrett and Keil do use an interesting variation in their study in attempting to control for bias. With one group of subjects, they substituted for God the “fictitious characters,” Mog, Beebo, or Swek, “from another dimension of existence” “endowed with the properties commonly associated with God” (Barrett and Keil , 132, 145). These subjects did much better at avoiding anthropomorphism. However, this was the only variation of the study in which the researchers provided subjects with explicit descriptions of the extraordinary qualities of the super‐agent(s), asking subjects to “try to keep in mind when reading the stories” these “fairly unusual characteristics” (145). Furthermore, this variation involved an unlimited time for subjects to answer questions with a printed transcript of the stories as well as of the descriptions of the three super‐agents in front of them (132). Thus, I do not find its results conclusive as to an allegedly greater tendency to anthropomorphize God than postulated “natural” super‐agents.

I will offer some concluding thoughts on the respective roles of preconscious mechanisms and conscious reflection. Some research supports the existence of two decision‐making systems of mammalian brains operating at different speeds in different contexts. The faster subcortical system would manifest the stronger tendency to overdetect agency. The slower, more reflective, in certain ways more accurate, cortical system could thus serve as a corrective to overactive agency detection in religious matters (as it clearly does in everyday situations where we figure out that the rustle in the bush is just the wind rather than a harmful predator). I would caution both that I suspect the human brain is too complex to be reduced to just two systems here and that the systems sometimes influence each other rather than simply work separately. I grant then that prereflective processes affect conscious reflection. I also acknowledge Cohen, Lanman, Whitehouse, and McCauley's claim that, by researching unconscious processes, CSR does not deny the existence of other influences on religious belief and behavior (2008, 114). Additionally, philosopher of religion Kelly James Clark and Barrett (), as well as philosopher Joshua C. Thurow (), argue that CSR theories and findings relating to hyperactive agency detection do not debunk religious belief provided independent evidence supports it, here appealing to reflective reasoning and to religious experience. (While Clark and Barrett stipulate the immediate nature of religious experience apart from the “reasoning faculty” and “propositional evidence” [2011, 670], neither they nor Thurow acknowledge that claims of such experiences could easily be suspect as being dependent on unreflective hyperactive agency detection.) I especially welcome Harvey Whitehouse's declaration that “conscious reasoning and reflection also influence the way we behave, in turn shaping and constraining processes of cultural innovation and transmission” (2007, 250; see also 267), as well as Richard Sosis and Jordan Kiper's underlining the “fallacy of… using a proximate mechanism to dispel a higher‐order belief” and the difficulty of “a move from unreflective to reflective cognition” (2013, 260). However, this caveat of Sosis and Kiper regarding “the claims of CSR” does critique much of the CSR community. And Clark and Barrett generalize that those cognitive scientists of religion who view religious belief as an “evolutionary by‐product” find such belief untenable (2001, 662–63). Furthermore, to my knowledge CSR has done little research on how conscious thinking influences religious belief or on how the beliefs of adult culture, which may reflect conscious reflection, affect children's beliefs in supernatural agency and meaning. Though all cognitive scientists of religion might accept the influence of reflection on the details of supernatural beliefs, my sense is that most assume that hyperactive detection agency adequately explains the genesis and persistence of all belief in supernatural power(s) apart from any appeal to reasons derived from reflection. In the pages of this journal, Lluis Oviedo notes the focus of CSR on “unconscious deep mechanisms” and its neglect of the “conscious mind” (Oviedo , 113–14, 118; see also Oviedo , 391). He points to the incapability of these mechanisms to explain religious conversion, in its movement from one complex system to another (Oviedo , 112, 122). Oviedo also cites several cognitivists who seem “to explain away religion as a whole” (Oviedo , 40) including Joseph Bulbulia's characterization of religion as “cognitive noise,” “illusion,” and “self‐deception” (Bulbulia 2005, 84, 90) and the following from Pascal Boyer: “Cognitive accounts of religion even suggest that there is no good reason for the existence of religious thoughts and behaviors” (Boyer , 40, my emphasis). Perhaps not coincidentally, Boyer titled his 2001 book Explaining Religion. In this vein, I would add Paul Bloom's contention that “the predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena … is an incidental by‐product of cognitive functioning gone awry” (Bloom , 105). Finally, I would emphasize that the great complexity and detail of the religious beliefs and practices of most human societies through prehistory and history demand a large role for reflection centered in the neocortex. Sharing a modern scientific worldview with CSR, I grant the inaccuracy of animistic beliefs. However, animistic and other religious societies, through their prereflective and more reflective thinking, may have realized a deeper wisdom than typically allowed by CSR: that our embodied existence may be imbued with sacred meaning inherent in the nature of reality.

Unconscious mechanisms and larger meaning

Speaking of meaning, as suggested earlier some cognitive scientists of religion not only regard mental mechanisms as causing belief in illusory supernatural spirits but also as causing humans to posit a nonexistent sacred or underlying or overarching meaning or purpose to life. In contrast, they maintain the reality of at most individual or group human meaning. In evaluating moral meaning, Jesse Bering writes that our sense “that we should or ought to behave a certain way” (, 70, emphasis Bering's) and our perception of “‘good’ and ‘evil’” (, 108) are wholly matters of “natural evolutionary processes” (, 109), “because morality works in a mechanistic, evolutionary sense” (, 75). Thus, “the resultant cognitive system created the functional illusion that the social behaviors of the self ‘mattered’ outside of human relations” (Bering 2006, 461). Not only rejecting the notion of particular events as supernatural signs—a rejection I share—Bering goes much further in denying “an inherent purpose in life” (, 74). Our teleo‐functional proclivities, fully explained by natural selection, cause even nontheists to ask about “the purpose of life,” unable to “easily shake their curiosity about this seemingly grand and obscure mystery” (Bering , 46). Indeed, Bering titles one chapter of The Belief Instinct, “A Life without Purpose” (, 39–75).

Paul Bloom expounds upon our tendency to regard the natural word as artifactual, a tendency he views as cognitively mistaken in light of evolutionary theory (, 57–63). Evolutionary theory thus contradicts the “appealing” notion of purpose: “Artifacts have purposes, they exist for reasons, and they can be put to proper and improper use. If we are artifacts, then all of this holds true for us. Indeed, religious texts are often explicit as to what those purposes are” (2004, 63).

Like Bering and Bloom, Edward Slingerland holds that evolution explains why “our promiscuous teleology and overactive theory of mind” give rise to a concern for long‐term or larger meaning (Slingerland , 286). He states that “feeling this kind of resonance between our own concerns and the functioning of the universe makes us feel really, really good” (, 285, emphasis Slingerland's) and that “(t)he feeling that our work or life has a purpose involves embedding it in an at least implicit narrative” (, 286). Such feeling is illusory, however, “involv(ing) the evolutionary hijacking of reward centers in the brain,” albeit “we are apparently designed to be irresistibly vulnerable to this illusion” (, 286–87).

Thus the reductive physicalism of many cognitive scientists of religion leads to rejecting the reality of any sacred or larger underlying or overarching meaning or purpose to life or to nature, and perhaps leads to the precarious status of any meaning, given the mechanistic and illusion‐weaving qualities of evolution.

Transfers of consciousness

One type of phenomena that innate dualists point to is the transfer of consciousness to another body, as in religious claims of possessionary experiences (Bloom , 213) or in literature or film such as: (1) “The Odyssey where the companions of Odysseus are magically transformed so that they ‘had the head, and voice, and bristles, and body of swine; but their mind remained unchanged as before’” (Bloom , 195); (2) the film Freaky Friday, where mother and daughter exchange bodies; and (3) the Harry Potter books and movies where Voldemort possesses another character's body. Cohen and Barrett conducted a study in which they asked subjects to imagine a mathematics classroom setting in which “somehow Beth's mind went into Amy's body” (2008, 34). Not surprisingly, the subjects concluded that the resulting person would have Beth's superior thinking capabilities, as in solving math problems, and Amy's superior physical capabilities, as in running fast. Given the description of the scenario, I would expect subjects to imagine that Beth's memories and knowledge would be transferred. An initial problem in concluding that dualism underlies these phenomena is, apart from the religious claims of possession, precisely their undisputed fictional nature. Readers and viewers have suspended disbelief about something they may regard as impossible (even as cognitive scientists typically regard religious possessionary experience as impossible). Nevertheless, explaining how humans can make sense of these phenomena is the crucial substantive issue. Genuine mind‐body dualism entails that a mind can exist in an absolutely discarnate state. However, in popular fiction, no mention of any disembodied transitional state ever occurs; characters always have a body of some sort or another. Likewise, in shamanistic possessionary experiences, I do not know of a case where a shaman claims that a spirit was disembodied before possessing the shaman or where a shaman claims to be disembodied before possessing the body of an animal. It is dubious that a totally disembodied state is even imaginable or even meaningful except in terms of the most abstract language. Yet the innate dualists’ position would seem to commit them to the notion that people intuit the viability of a totally discarnate state when they make sense of transfers or exchanges of bodies and consciousnesses. As with very young children, the innate dualist turns persons into tacit Platonic or Cartesian philosophers. Mark Johnson writes, “Shamans in aboriginal cultures… observe animals closely by empathetically ‘becoming’ the animals, and ritual practices in a wide range of aboriginal religions employ the movements of animals to achieve an ecstatic experience, an experience of being in the body of a very different kind of being” (1987, 556). A much more parsimonious explanation than innate dualism of why we can follow an account of a religious possession or of the exchange of bodies in popular culture is that we humans are essentially embodied beings who naturally imagine in bodily ways.

Afterlife belief

For innate dualists, that most human cultures have believed in life after death constitutes the strongest evidence for their position, because they regard such belief as tantamount to a dualistic belief in the persistence of disembodied spirits. As Slingerland puts it, in contrast to “entertaining nondualist ideas at some abstract level,” “the feeling that the most important part of a person—especially ourselves and the people whom we love—might somehow subsist after death presents itself spontaneously and quite powerfully to human beings, appears to be universal, and takes quite a bit of cognitive work to overcome” (, 395). Bering begins a major article with this assertion: “By stating that psychological states survive death, one is committing to a radical form of mind‐body dualism” (2006, 453). Bering and Bjorklund conducted an influential study on children's beliefs about a mouse eaten by an alligator. To summarize, they conducted three experiments with varying configurations of preschool, kindergarten, early elementary, older elementary, and/or adult participants, who answered questions in response to the depiction of the mouse's demise. The types of questions in the three experiments were, respectively: (1) biological; (2) psychobiological and cognitive; and (3) biological, psychobiological, and four categories of cognitive, namely, perceptual, desire, emotional, and epistemic. General results showed that most of the younger children believed that psychological states of the mouse continued, while older elementary children and adults believed that most such states did not. Additionally, while even younger children believed that biological states ended, they were mixed regarding psychobiological states. Though this article grants the difficulty of separating evolutionary from cultural mechanisms (2004, 218), Bering and Bjorklund conclude, and Bloom concurs (Bloom , 110), that if cultural learning were the only influence, belief in continuation of psychological states should increase with age due to the impact of religious traditions (Bering and Bjorklund 2004, 230). At the same time Bering and Bjorklund judge that the growing biological knowledge about death that comes with age does work to decrease such belief (218–19). (I would note that such knowledge would combine natural developmental and cultural influences). In interpreting the continuation of psychological states, the authors do not consider the possibility that subjects might believe that the mouse continued to exist in another body, perhaps near the deceased biological body or perhaps in another world. With that possibility in mind, I will consider some of the more specific results of the study. In light of different responses for psychobiological versus biological states and ruling out cultural influence, Bering and Bjorklund asseverate, “It seems strangely counterintuitive that” younger children “stated that dead agents did not need to drink water but answered that it was possible for dead agents to be thirsty” (2004, 224; see also 229–30). If these children were strict dualists, they would realize that a truly disembodied soul would not feel thirsty. Bering and Bjorklund attribute this “counterintuitive” result to, simply put, the immaturity of young children's biological knowledge (2004, 224). While I do not doubt that this partly explains the discrepancy, an additional factor may help explain it: Young children who believed that the mouse now existed with a different body might more plausibly think that the mouse could feel thirsty without needing water than would children who believed the mouse was now a bodiless mind.

As suggested above, the Bering and Bjorklund experiments yield an overall pattern of decreasing belief with age in continuation of both biological and psychological states. And as mentioned above, Experiment 3 differentiates the questions about states into six categories: biological, psychobiological (e.g., being thirsty), perceptual, desire, emotional, and epistemic. While late elementary children show a decrease in continuation belief in all six categories compared with kindergarteners, changes in the biological category (save one question) are fairly dramatic, and those in the psychobiological quite dramatic. Changes in the perceptual category are not that dramatic, because kindergarteners already show a relatively high rate of disbelief regarding such continuation. Finally, changes in the categories of desire, emotional, and epistemic, while significant, are not dramatic. This means that a significant proportion of the older children believe in continuation with respect to several questions in each of these latter three categories. Moreover, a significant proportion of adults believe in continuation with respect to at least one question in each of these three categories (indeed, adults showed a higher continuation belief than older children for five of the eleven questions in these three categories, although in terms of overall percentages adults showed less continuation belief) (Bering and Bjorklund 2004, 225–29). I find all of the results of Experiment 3 consistent with the following. For those who entertain the possibility of an afterlife world for the dead mouse, their picture of the nature of that world sharpens with age, including beliefs that afterlife denizens have more accurate knowledge about certain matters and that good predominates over evil more so than in this world (Bering and Bjorklund do notice participants’ greater likelihood to attribute positive than negative feelings to the dead mouse; 2004, 228). In a related vein, adults’ much higher disbelief that the mouse still wants to go home or still hopes to get better at math perhaps reflects their picture of an otherworldly existence where the mouse is already at home and does not need math. Additionally, that 100% of adults disbelieve that the mouse is “still scared of the alligator” coheres with belief in a positive afterlife world (by comparison, the next highest percentage otherwise for adults in these three categories is 88%, while the highest for late elementary children is 81%). I found particularly striking that 64% of adults responded that the dead mouse “still loves his mom” (compared with 80% of late elementary and 94% of kindergarten children). I would guess that this high percentage reflects a combination of two factors: (1) Love is strongly connected to belief in a positive afterlife world, even for some generally unsure about animal survival; and (2) Some adults who disbelieve that mouse is consciously experiencing love of mom in the present might still hold that once love has existed, in some (inchoate) sense it can never die. In relation to all the results of this significant series of experiments, I find nothing that favors innate mind‐body dualism with its positing of belief in immaterial minds to explain belief in continuation of subjective states after death over belief that subjective states continue in a different form of embodiment. Interestingly, in response to criticism of Queen's University colleague Mitch Hodge, Bering in his recent The Belief Instinct evidences some rethinking on afterlife beliefs: “it's impossible for us to imagine all those souls clamoring about in the afterlife without also picturing them as being embodied in some form” (2011, 128). However, this rethinking does not lead him in that text to reinterpret the results of his and Bjorklund's experiments nor to directly recant his assertion that afterlife belief entails “a radical form of mind‐body dualism.”

The assumption that afterlife belief rests upon innate dualism flies in the face of evidence from the history of religions. Primal religions typically believe in an embodied world in some spatial relation to our present one—though unreachable until we die—and often better than our present one, without all the evils. The cliché “happy hunting ground” represents one version of this. Moreover, the spirits of ancestors as they interact with this world, though without some of the limitations of our bodies, are hardly disembodied. Early theorist of religion E. B. Tylor reports that primal cultures, though often conceiving spirits as “vaporous,” most definitely do not regard them as “immaterial.” In one example, he notes how some tribal religions make sure an opening exists in a container where a spirit abides so that it could escape (Tylor 1871, 410–13). When the Toraja of Indonesia are about to sacrifice a water buffalo, they warn the spirits to keep away lest they suffer injury (Eyre and Montagnon 2001).

As ancient agricultural civilizations developed, afterlife beliefs typically changed: In some cases afterlife belief died; in many others an unhappy picture of the afterlife emerged. I attribute this change to the dominance of agriculture in these cultures and in their controlling pictures about life: just like dead plants, dead human bodies are buried in the earth. However, whereas new plants come from the soil and nourish new human life, human individuals do not revive from the grave. Typically, afterlife belief focuses on an underworld where people are mere shades or shadows of their former selves, as in the Hebrew concept of Sheol. Note that the dead do have a body, albeit a shadowy one. While they do not suffer complete disembodiment, I sense that the lack of full‐blooded, full‐bodied life constitutes precisely the most unsatisfactory aspect of existence in Sheol or Hades. The unhappy nature of such an afterlife takes some of the steam out of the argument for a human compulsion to believe that some (disembodied) part of us survives. Annihilation appears to be a better prospect than “life” after death in Sheol.

Additionally, I would note that resurrection of the body represents the most original version of life after death in the Western monotheisms of rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The influence of Greek philosophy, especially (neo)Platonism, has complicated the picture in Western theology, introducing a disembodied soul—at least until the judgment day—with which to contend. Nevertheless, I suspect that for everyday believers in an afterlife from these religions, the vast majority imagine immediate presence in heaven with a perfect body, reunited with departed family and friends whose transformed bodies they immediately recognize—a point Bering might now be willing to concede.

As suggested above, Bloom's equation of even young children distinguishing between people and things with innate mind‐body dualism involves interpretation. Might a better interpretation avail? Ten years ago following his lecture at a Yale College reunion, I asked Bloom whether any of the experiments with children supported the hypothesis that humans innately distinguish between disembodied souls and mindless bodies over the hypothesis that humans innately distinguish between animate, sentient, intentional embodied beings and inanimate things. He answered in the negative. Nevertheless, in an e‐mail from 2008, he indicated that he finds more “compelling” the thesis of mind‐body dualism for interpreting the results of Bering and Bjorklund's experiments than that of an animate‐inanimate distinction. Specifically, he wrote that the fact that most young children believe that a dead mouse's mental states continue while its biological states do not “strongly suggests that kids think it has no body but still has a mind.” As I have argued above, however, that the mouse's mental states continue in a different body explains the results as well or better than a bodiless mind. It appears that cognitive scientists of religion have begged the question of whether possessionary/transfer and afterlife beliefs entail dualistic disembodiment.