ABSTRACT
Cognitive dispositions that result from the evolutionary history of the species account for certain general or recurrent properties of cultural representations. The main line of argument is that human minds are predisposed to build particular types of conceptual structure from the earliest stages of conceptual development. The domain of religious ontological concepts is not a free-for-all where any odd conceptual association is as good as any other. The salience constraint is satisfied by the fact that the central assumptions of most religious systems, in otherwise diverse environments, constitute direct violations of intuitive expectations. The inference constraint is satisfied by the fact that counter-intuitive elements do not exhaust the representation of religious entities and agencies. Many religious traditions include some assumptions concerning the intentional features of particular religious artefacts. The distribution of cultural representations seems to confirm the prediction that religious concepts include violations of core expectations found in intuitive ontology, rather than violations of information at the basic level.
