. >> guest: i think that's really obvious in a way from when one looks at what anism is, a term that applies to the prerevealed religions of the world in which we're probably the dominant outlook for tens of thousands of years before a historical period, and what you see there is app attempt by human beings to give some explanation, provide some concept frame work to think about the world. what they understood was agency. they understood their own capacity to pick up a stone to throw it or pull water or make a noise. they thought everything that happened in nature must have app agency behind it that the wind, the thunder, the rain must be caused by something. that is a kind of protoscience, an attempt to explain the explanatory frame work of ideas. if you look at how ideas about religion is changed over the my millennium, you notice where the sea gods and the rain gods were present in nature, bit by bit, moved away as we understood more. they went to the mountain tops, for example, and elsewhere and in the old testament, there's a burning bush on the mountain top and a pillar of smok