The most culturally successful supernatural beliefs mildly violate intuitive expectations.

Evidence

For example, research shows that supernatural concepts that mildly violate intuitive expectations we have about agents, life forms, and physical objects are more memorable in the long run than those that are wildly counterintuitive or completely intuitive. Surveying the kinds of gods and spirits one finds in the ethnographic record, Pascal Boyer observes that there is an infinitely large set of possible supernatural beliefs. Yet the actual supernatural beliefs we observe around the world are but a narrow subset of the possible set. (Boyer offers many amusing examples that are not good divine candidates, such as: There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on Wednesdays!) Existing beliefs correspond to a few basic templates that are specific to how we intuitively think about agents, living things, and inert objects: There is only a rather short Catalogue of Supernatural Templates that more or less exhausts the range of culturally successful concepts in this domain. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 127

Categorization

• QUESTION: What counts as ‘mildly’ vs ‘wildly’ counterintuitive — is there a testable continuum, and does the fumi-e-era Japanese Christian God fall on the memorable side?
• XREF: Ties to classic cognitive science-of-religion findings (Boyer, Sperber, Barrett) on minimally counterintuitive concepts; resonates with the reader’s Big God analytical frame.
• CANDY: Boyer’s example of a God who exists only on Wednesdays is a genuinely tweetable absurdity.
• SEED: Article angle: why some religious concepts ‘win’ the cultural market — the memorability economy of minimally counterintuitive gods.