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I elaborate the idea first proposed by Hans Penner that religious language is patently false in a rereading of Donald Davidson's essay, "What Metaphors Mean." I explore a Davidsonian paradigm concerning the semantics of superhuman agents. Religious language is meaningful because it is patently false or trivially true. Patency entails a breakdown at the surface that runs counter to the normative meaning of words. Since no special form of cognition or semantics is necessary to account for religious language, following Nancy Frankenberry's argument about how metaphor and religious language are used, I explore the possibility that false reasoning is a kind of costly signal. Finally I suggest that literacy alters this matrix because it focuses attention on the literal instantiation of sentences in the form of inscriptions, thus exaggerating the role of false reasoning in relation to religion.

I discuss problems importing evolutionary language into the study of religion. It is not impossible to do, but it is difficult to carry out properly in practice. I suggest five criteria for scholarship in the study of religion to amount to good science when incorporating such language. They are 1) avoiding just-so storytelling as much as possible 2) the requirement to add a compelling level of explanation beyond the historical narrative 3) clearly distinguishing between proximate and ultimate forms of causation and explanation, and favoring proximate causes where possible 4) addressing the specific content of religion directly as part of the narrative 5) being explicit about the genre of scholarship undertaken, whether science-writing, humanistic exploration, or some mix of the two. Wiebe and Martin's arguments do not end up rising to the challenge that they themselves have instigated to have a truly scientific study of religion.Keywords religion, explanation, evolution, just-so story, teleology, science Wiebe's title may appear to suggest that he plans to explain the origin of religion, however this is not the case. He wishes to explain the origin of "religions," by which he means those institutional forms of religion that arose after the agricultural revolution in Eurasia, "the first epidemiological transition." When human beings began to settle in great number, major diseases and in turn epidemics got hold for the first time. Religions became behavioral immune systems that kept these diseases out by regulating contact with out-groups. Modern conditions since the industrial revolution involve new human means to combat diseases and epidemics (the discovery of germ theory) and as such presently religions are no longer needed for that purpose and thus become, as Wiebe says, auto-immune diseases themselves.Martin argues that Mithraism was a response to "anxiety" produced by the cosmological revolution when the three-tiered model of the cosmos (underworld, world, heavens) was replaced by a Ptolemaic model of the earth as a

According to Deborah Tollefsen, from the analytic perspective called “interpretivism”, there is a reasonable way in which groups can be said to have mental states. She bases her argument on the every-day use of language, where people speak as if groups have states such as intentions, desires and wishes. Such propositional attitudes form the basis of any account of truth-conditional semantics, the rules by which people grasp the conditions under which an utterance is true. If groups (abstract units of people) have mental states, perhaps superhuman agents have them too. One argument that may contradict this premise is one that says that, whereas groups exist, superhuman agents do not. However, if groups exist on the basis of normative narratives about them and the institutionalized actions they carry out in the world, the same can be said for superhuman agents. They are like legal fictions: fictional but real. Superhuman agents are fictional and real in a similar sense as groups.1