ABSTRACT
In Guthrie’s view, religion quite simply is anthropomorphism (Guthrie 1993: 178), and the result of an evolved “perceptual strategy” (ibid.: 41). Just as frogs are prone to see moving dots on a screen as ies, and sea urchins will avoid any dark shadow as if it were an enemy sh, humans too tend to interpret their environment with the “models generated by their most pressing interests” (Guthrie 1996: 418; 2002: 54). And what matters most to humans (and mattered most to humans during the Pleistocene) is other humans. So even if the perceptual strategy of anthropomorphism generates massive overdetection, it has had adaptive value nevertheless, as the price of false positives is much lower than the price of missing important cues. Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
