Abstract
It is to the commentators’ great credit that they have managed to cull the conceptual imperfections of my article “The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs” (Bering 2002a) into a fairly coherent discussion of the “innateness” of representations of dead agents’ minds. In response to their insightful remarks, I will do my best to clarify my position on precisely this topic of the etiology of religious concepts. Unlike Barrett, who stated that “the chicken-and-egg problem of whether intuitive ideas ll in explicit ones or the other way around may be moot” (p. *), I cannot think of a more important, central question for researchers to be concerned with. Still, because experimental research on the cognitive bases of religion has only recently begun in earnest (e.g., Barrett 1998; Barrett & Keil 1996; Barrett, Richert & Driesenga 2001; Bering 2002; Bering & Bjorklund 2003; Barrett & Nyhof 2001; Boyer & Ramble 2001; Evans 2001; Kelemen 1999; Norenzayan & Atran, in press; Walker 1992; Woolley & Phelps 2001), to some extent I feel it premature to forcibly argue the position
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