Lay believers perceive God as a personlike mind, not an abstract force

Evidence

These lines of evidence point to the same conclusion: contrary to some theological doctrines that cast God as an abstract universal force, Ground of Being, or the totality of everything, in the everyday thinking of the faithful, God is perceived to be a personlike being with a mind. God “perception” piggybacks on mind perception. Mentalizing capacities enable believers to see God or gods as intentional agents with mental states, but these capacities do not fix the particular content matter of gods’ minds. There is a great deal of room for cultural evolution to fill in this content, as long as the content doesn’t stray too far from evolved human psychology. Historically and contemporarily, cultures differ in their conceptions of whether, and to what degree, gods know or care about human affairs, and importantly, if they do care, what particular domains of human activities they care about. As we shall see, one idea—Big, powerful, interventionist Gods—culturally spread at the expense of rival ideas because these types of gods could take on supernatural monitoring duties, allowing societies to expand their cooperative reach. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 81

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the folk-theoretical personlike God from abstract theological depictions of God as ground of being.
• XREF: Directly grounds the reader’s project: Rodrigues’ God is the interventionist, monitoring Big God whose mind perception the fumi-e ritual weaponizes against. — connects to: God can be transcendent as pure difference without being an otherworldly entity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 751
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the analytical bridge: Big interventionist gods spread because they took on monitoring duties enabling cooperative expansion — the very mechanism Rodrigues experiences.