The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency

Cognition
Volume 129, Issue 1, October 2013, Pages 163–179
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.010

Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture, University of British Columbia, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada

Highlights

• Christians show higher responses to God’s knowledge of moral than nonmoral information.
• Tyvans show a bias towards moralizing explicitly nonmoral Tyvan spirit-masters.
• Tyvans reason about spirit-masters’ knowledge and concerns spatially.
• Wider attributed knowledge breadth of spirit-masters predicts attributed concern for morality.

Abstract

The present work is the first study to systematically compare the minds of gods by examining some of the intuitive processes that guide how people reason about them. By examining the Christian god and the spirit-masters of the Tyva Republic, it first confirms that the consensus view of the Christian god’s mind is one of omniscience with acute concern for interpersonal social behavior (i.e., moral behaviors) and that Tyvan spirit-masters are not as readily attributed with knowledge or concern of moral information. Then, it reports evidence of a moralization bias of gods’ minds; American Christians who believe that God is omniscient rate God as more knowledgeable of moral behaviors than nonmoral information. Additionally, Tyvans who do not readily report pro- or antisocial behavior among the things that spirit-masters care about will nevertheless rate spirit-masters’ knowledge and concern of moral information higher than nonmoral information. However, this knowledge is distributed spatially; the farther away from spirits’ place of governance a moral behavior takes place, the less they know and care about it. Finally, the wider the breadth of knowledge Tyvans attribute to spirit-masters, the more they attribute moral concern for behaviors that transpire beyond their jurisdiction. These results further demonstrate that there is a significant gulf between expressed beliefs and intuitive religious cognition and provides evidence for a moralization bias of gods’ minds.

Keywords

Religion; Minds of gods; Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis; Omniscience; Cultural consensus analysis; Theological correctness

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027713001224