Believers implicitly represent even an omniscient God as having humanlike mental limits
Evidence
“Perceiving” gods, therefore, is an act that is fundamentally tied to our ability to perceive other minds. There are several sources of evidence that point to this hypothesis about the cognitive origins of belief in gods. First, believers spontaneously reason about God as if God had humanlike mental states. Explicitly omniscient gods should be implicitly represented as having limited, humanlike (and ungodlike) mental abilities. In a now classic study, psychologists Justin Barrett and Frank Keil presented participants with a story of God performing various actions. For example, God could perform multiple mental activities simultaneously, and could perceive events without sensory inputs. Later, the participants were asked to recall the story. Overwhelmingly, participants, including believers who explicitly told the researchers that they believe God is omniscient, mentally recast the omniscient God as having humanlike mental limitations—this recast God needed to finish one task before embarking on another, and needed to see events to know that they occurred. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 76
“Perceiving” gods, therefore, is an act that is fundamentally tied to our ability to perceive other minds. There are several sources of evidence that point to this hypothesis about the cognitive origins of belief in gods. First, believers spontaneously reason about God as if God had humanlike mental states. Explicitly omniscient gods should be implicitly represented as having limited, humanlike (and ungodlike) mental abilities. In a now classic study, psychologists Justin Barrett and Frank Keil presented participants with a story of God performing various actions. For example, God could perform multiple mental activities simultaneously, and could perceive events without sensory inputs. Later, the participants were asked to recall the story. Overwhelmingly, participants, including believers who explicitly told the researchers that they believe God is omniscient, mentally recast the omniscient God as having humanlike mental limitations—this recast God needed to finish one task before embarking on another, and needed to see events to know that they occurred. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 76
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s analytical project: the fumi-e scene in Silence works because believers implicitly need God to actually ‘see’ the trampling — the explicit omniscience is psychically weaker than the implicit perceptual model. — connects to: Some deities possess spatially bounded omniscience limited to their own territory; Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God; Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods (+3 more)
- QUESTION: Does the fumi-e ritual weaponize this very gap — the implicit humanlike-limit God who must ‘see’ events — by creating a public visible performance that the implicit God cannot ignore?
- corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 76
Broader Connections
- Believing in God is inseparable from anthropomorphizing God as a personlike mind
#corroborates(0.92) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 77 - Ordinary cognition, not special modules, produces religious beliefs
#expands(0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 44