God concepts must first pass a cognitive hurdle before they can acquire anxiety-soothing functions

Evidence

Big thinkers of modernity, from Freud to Feuerbach, would have agreed with Franken: religious belief thrives partly because it soothes our deepest existential fears. Reason, logic, or science have little to give us when we face intense anxieties about death, chaos, loneliness, or meaninglessness. It’s not that religion originates from the need to soothe existential worries. Of course, gods and spirits have to first pass a cognitive hurdle—they have to be intuitively appealing notions to begin with. But once they resonate with common intuitions, they can take on additional features and relieve these anxieties. Those versions of gods that guarantee immortality, order, social connection, and meaning become more attractive in the cultural landscape. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 614

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about Big Gods’ cultural selection; the cognitive hurdle prefigures the later argument that watchful gods (Omnisearcher) survive precisely because they pass this hurdle AND relieve anxiety.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that existential comfort is an acquired feature of gods, not their origin — useful boundary for understanding the Big God mechanism.