Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God

Evidence

People “see human” in all kinds of things and beings, from natural formations, to artifacts, to pets and gods. Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie gives many examples of this in his book Faces in the Clouds. Gods are no exception. Closely tied to Barret and Keil’s original findings are studies showing that, despite scriptural prohibitions, God is believed to possess humanlike mental attributes such as beliefs, emotions, and intentions. Psychologists Adam Waytz, Nicholas Epley, and John Cacioppo tested everyday intuitions about the extent to which various entities had mental states, such as consciousness, awareness, and emotional experiences. They asked participants about four commonly anthropomorphized entities: nonhuman animals, natural entities such as rocks and mountains, technological devices such as computers and car engines, and God and other supernatural agents. Peoples’ tendency to attribute humanlike minds to God was so tied up with their belief in God that it made no sense to separate anthropomorphizing God from believing in God. My own studies independently confirm this finding: the intuition that God is a personlike being with mental states and believing in God are highly related. An abstract, impersonal God is theologically possible, but psychologically not compelling. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 77 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

“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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Belief in a god is separable from commitment to it, except in monotheism.; Some deities possess spatially bounded omniscience limited to their own territory; Autism-linked mentalizing deficits reduce belief in a personal God (+8 more)

Related

• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods (similarity 0.93)
• Believing in God is inseparable from anthropomorphizing God as a personlike mind (similarity 0.90)
• Believers implicitly represent even an omniscient God as having humanlike mental limits (similarity 0.89)
• Religious belief depends on mentalizing skills that imagine God’s mental states. (similarity 0.86)
• Some deities possess spatially bounded omniscience limited to their own territory (similarity 0.85)
• Cultural evolution fills in god content within evolved mentalizing constraints (similarity 0.85)
• Even believers affirming divine omniscience intuitively treat God as limited (similarity 0.85)
• Autism-linked mentalizing deficits reduce belief in a personal God (similarity 0.85)
• Mentalizing capacities are cognitive foundations for belief in God (similarity 0.83)
• Lower mentalizing ability erodes belief in a personal God. (similarity 0.83)
• Reduced mentalizing capacity directly lowers belief in God (similarity 0.83)
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.82)
• Religious belief is a by-product of cognitive predispositions, not an evolved adaptation (similarity 0.82)
• Lay believers perceive God as a personlike mind, not an abstract force (similarity 0.81)
• Impaired mentalizing, not social isolation, explains atheism among autistics (similarity 0.81)

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
• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods #corroborates (0.88)
• Believers implicitly represent even an omniscient God as having humanlike mental limits #exemplifies (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 76
• Ordinary cognition, not special modules, produces religious beliefs #expands (0.78) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 44