Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty.

Evidence

It is easy to see how the idea of supernatural monitoring is rooted in the more ancient and mundane human preoccupation with social monitoring. If the notion of powerful and perceptive people watching is something people already intuitively accept, it is not a giant step from that notion to powerful and perceptive gods who see when no one else can. Nevertheless, omniscience that transcends physical, biological, and psychological limitations is a somewhat counterintuitive thought. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 103

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Mechanism by which the omniscient gaze naturalizes: gods as extrapolation of human surveillance — key to the reader’s comparative analysis.
• QUESTION: If omniscience is counterintuitive, what makes it cognitively catchy enough to spread as a belief?

Related

• Gods who see everything derive from humans who watch each other (similarity 0.94)
• Potent supernatural monitors must balance transcendence with human-like graspability (similarity 0.85)
• Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission (similarity 0.85)
• People apply the same mental machinery to supernatural watchers as human watchers (similarity 0.84)
• People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers. (similarity 0.84)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.84)
• Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent (similarity 0.83)
• Supernatural monitoring drove human groups to scale from small bands to vast societies (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural agents’ minimal counterintuitiveness explains their cultural advantage (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.81)
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.81)
• Belief in a watching God affects behavior only when consciously activated. (similarity 0.81)
• Omniscient God thoughts are situationally activated, not chronically present (similarity 0.80)