Potent supernatural monitors must balance transcendence with human-like graspability

Evidence

Yet, a fully human god is no god either. Without some degree of omniscience and omnipotence, gods could not be potent supernatural monitors. The very point of supernatural monitoring is the outsourcing of social monitoring duties to gods so that moral concern can be extended writ large—to watch even when no one is watching, to care when no one cares, to threaten when no one can threaten. The more culturally successful Big Gods are, therefore, the ultimate balancing act between two competing psychological imperatives: one, these gods must exercise supernatural powers by transcending limitations that otherwise constrain human abilities to observe and morally intervene; two, these gods must also share enough properties of human mind perception to make them intuitively graspable and emotionally potent. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 106

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This dual-imperative balancing act between counterintuitive transcendence and intuitive personhood is the psychological mechanism the reader wants to map onto Rodrigues’ God in Silence — the abstract vs. personal God tension is exactly the analytical bridge.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘supernatural monitor’ function as outsourced social monitoring extended writ large.

Related

• Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty. (similarity 0.85)
• Gods who see everything derive from humans who watch each other (similarity 0.85)
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.84)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.83)
• Mentalizing enables believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.81)
• People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers. (similarity 0.81)
• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods (similarity 0.81)
• Lay believers perceive God as a personlike mind, not an abstract force (similarity 0.81)
• Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods (similarity 0.80)
• Even believers affirming divine omniscience intuitively treat God as limited (similarity 0.80)
• People apply the same mental machinery to supernatural watchers as human watchers (similarity 0.80)
• Some deities possess spatially bounded omniscience limited to their own territory (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent (similarity 0.80)
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.80)
• Mentalizing capacities are cognitive foundations for belief in God (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods #corroborates (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 75
• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods #corroborates (0.80) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 71