God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware

Evidence

The trial-and-error processes of cultural evolution stumbled on supernatural monitoring, a principle that piggybacks on preexisting capacities for social monitoring. If watched people are nice people, watchful deities—Big Eyes in the Sky—could encourage cooperation, even when no one is watching. Being watched by morally involved agents—whether human or superhuman—is therefore one key reason why religion encourages cooperation. No need to postulate, then, a “God part of the brain.” The same social intuitions that enable human social control also serve to realize supernatural surveillance. Recent social psychology experiments, discussed in the next chapter, support the idea that when God is on peoples’ minds, there are greater levels of generosity, cooperation, and lower levels of cheating in anonymous contexts. Thoughts of God also make people feel monitored, precisely as one would expect if supernatural monitoring was at play. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 95

Categorization

• XREF: This is the precise load-bearing mechanism for the reader’s Big God argument applied to Rodrigues: his felt omniscient observer is supernatural monitoring built on ordinary witnessed-gaze psychology.