I once read an article on Cracked.com by a Christian who seemed to be fairly informed about atheist arguments regarding God’s non-existence. However, despite this knowledge, he continued to believe in God because he claimed he could feel God’s presence as though he was sitting right next to him. How could anyone feel the presence of God unless he was actually there to be felt? As usual, science has some interesting answers.
About 30% of American children between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
develop a friendship with an imaginary companion.[1]
According to psychologists, this behavior is perfectly healthy and may even help
improve a child’s social abilities.[2]
What is worthy of note, however, is that many children get so caught up in
their fantasy that they believe they can see and hear their invisible comrades.[3]
While a child’s psychology is different from that of adults, it is still
possible the same mechanisms that make invisible friends so real to children
are the same that make God seem so tangible to fervent theists.
Wilson and Other Social
Surrogates
Remember Wilson the volleyball from the Tom Hanks movie “Castaway”? For
those of you who are unaware, the story was about a man named Chuck who was
stranded on an island all alone for 4 years. Wilson was a volleyball on which
Chuck drew a face and which became his closest companion during his years of
social isolation. They laughed, they cried, and they argued just like real
friends, except Wilson was just a volleyball. “Castaway depicts a deep truth
about the irrepressibly social nature of Homo sapiens,” says John Cacioppo, a
psychologist who studied people’s tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate
objects.[4]
In one of his studies, he discovered that lonely people are more likely to
describe gadgets in terms of humanlike mental states compared to non-lonely
people.[5]
Beyond inanimate objects, lonely people also turn to television and
other media personalities as a form of social surrogacy. Just as normal
friendships evolve by spending time together and sharing thoughts and stories,
these relationships evolve by observing media personalities and becoming
involved with their personal lives, idiosyncrasies, and experiences as if they
were real friends.[6]
Studies suggest these relationships can be taken so far that people can become
just as traumatized by the loss of a TV character as they would by the loss of
a close friend.[7]
While feeling God’s presence may not be the result of loneliness, the neuronal
wiring which allows humans to become enveloped in one-way illusory
relationships may still play a role in the phenomenon.
When God Talks Back
In the book “When God Talks Back” anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann set out
to describe her 4 year study of a “charismatic” sect of Pentecostal Christians
who are well known for their “concrete experiences of God’s realness.”[8]
In her research, Tanya sought to understand the mechanisms that led to these
experiences. What she discovered was that these particular Christians learned
to experience God by training their minds to think in a particular way. Specifically:[9]
- They learn a new theory of mind in which “the mind is not private, but thoughts and images are sensations one might have understood as self-generated are actually God speaking”
- They literally pretend that God is present. For example, one pastor suggested pouring God his own cup of coffee each morning.
- There is a common practice of congregants becoming emotional and crying while being reminded by their peers that God loves them unconditionally.
- Prayer was an important practice, which Tanya described as a “daydream-like engagement in which you are having a dialog with God”
Those who were most adept at prayer reported experiencing more vivid
mental imagery, and in some rare cases, brief auditory messages they believed
were from God. Tanya observed that practice played a major role in congregants’
ability to have these experiences, and decided to perform an experiment to see
if she could elicit them in others. This mini-study consisted of providing IPods
to two groups of Christians with different messages to listen to over a period
of several days. One group was to listen to a collection of lectures on the New
Testament. The other was to listen to a recording of Tanya walking through her
version of the spiritual exercises practiced by the charismatic sect she
studied. This recording included passages from the Bible, soothing music, and cues
to the listener to try to imagine God and visualize what the passages were
discussing.
After the study, the group members that listened to Tanya’s recording
were more likely to:
- Experience auditory sensory experiences (i.e. the voice of “God”)
- Experience vivid mental imagery
- Feel their sense of God changed as though he were more like a person
- Feel their spirituality had changed
Synthesis
The phenomena of childhood imaginary friends, anthropomorphization of inanimate
objects, and social surrogacy all show that people are capable of having intricate
human-like relationships without the presence of other humans. The Pentecostal
charismatic study shows that by training their minds to better imagine God, he
became so real to people that they could hear him speaking to them. Most
Christians/theists likely do not go to these extents to experience God. However,
over the course of their lives, the idea that God exists, God cares about them,
and God is listening to them is reinforced time and time again by their
co-religionists and during prayer. Thus, their minds are trained, often from
childhood, to imagine a God that is present in their lives. This means there
are likely large numbers of neurons in their brains dedicated to the idea of
God, and the more fervently they seek to experience him, the more vivid his
presence will appear to be. It is for this reason that many theists find
atheism to be quite preposterous, as they feel evidence of God’s presence every
day.
Resources:
Good overview of “When God Talks Back”
Great lecture on “When God Talks Back”
Good article on imaginary friends
Good article about social surrogacy
Good article on the science of Wilson the volleyball
Great article. I also see a huge amount of correlation between "relationship based theisms" and tulpamancy ( the art/science of creating imaginary friends ) Check out tulpa.info and read through their techniques for creating tulpas. Every single technique has its equivalent in various typical religious ceremony. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteFascinating. Thanks for the info!
ReplyDelete