Abstract
Miracles are real or imagined events that contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Miracles in the weak sense are unexplained counterintuitive events. Miracles in the strong sense are counterintuitive events we explain by referring to the counterintuitive agents and forces of various religious traditions. Such explanations result from the fact that our minds treat half–understood information by carrying out searches in the memory, trying to connect new information with something already known. This is cognitively the most economical way of dealing with new information: we obtain the maximum of relevance at minimal processing cost.
Keywords
cognitive science, domain specificity, evolutionary psychology, counterintuitiveness, miracles, intuitive ontology
How to Cite
Pyysiäinen, I., (2002) “Mind and Miracles”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 37(3), 729–740. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9744.00449