Comments on: Creating God in one's own image

By: Blog de Astronomia do astroPT » O Fim está próximo

Blog de Astronomia do astroPT » O Fim está próximo — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 09:07:49 +0000

[...] As pessoas imaginam Deus à sua semelhança. “Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people’s mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions. (…)” [...]

By: Begin PHASE THREE! | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

Begin PHASE THREE! | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:54:31 +0000

[...] Creating God in one’s own image [...]

By: Hukuk

Hukuk — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:32:31 +0000

I particularly liked the observation that there are two different regions of the brain used for thinking about one’s own opinions and the opinions of other people, except for God, and that God’s opinions are hypothesized using the former part. Doesn’t that basically make God like an imaginary friend? He is literally in their heads.

By: Gordon Freeman

Gordon Freeman — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:34:57 +0000

I hope you wouldn’t mind if I translate this text to Croatian language and place it on my web site. Of course I will give tributes to you. People in Croatia need to know of things like this. Well written.

By: Marv Bryce

Marv Bryce — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:12:03 +0000

I have sought and found after 80 years of seeking, no god. Good luck to those who have found the god of their own making. When you die, he dies.

By: Tony Jeremiah

Tony Jeremiah — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:26:31 +0000

Your reader suggests and explanation for our finding based on believing that God is the ultimate moral authority. Indeed, that's a very easy explanation for our results, one that we tested in a variety of ways early on, but one that we could not find any evidence to support. This mechanism also does not explain why, in some of the experiments, inferences about a well-liked and ambiguous figure—Bill Gates—were also considerably egocentric. Is Bill Gates an ultimate moral authority? Another possible explanation is that this reflects the internalization of prosperity theology, which couples morality, wealth, and religion. The same idea can be found in Max Weber's work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Additionally, I suspect the self-serving bias is also involved, which tends to show up more in Western than Eastern cultures (in fact, research suggests that persons in Eastern cultures tend to show the opposite self-effacing/modesty bias). So another interesting study would be to see whether the current study results can be replicated in cultures that have more of a collectivistic rather than individualistic ethos.

By: eric

eric — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:41:26 +0000

I would say “good job” except that Nietzsche made this conclusion 130 years ago (I wouldn’t be surprised if other philosophers had done the same). I guess my question is, were you unaware of this fact or did you merely forget to give credit where credit is due?
We are social animals. This means that our morality is implicitly a mediation between a consciousness that is self-interested, and a behavioral law that is dictated by our membership in a community.
Poking fun at religious myopia is a shallow way to address the issue. It makes just as much sense for someone like me were to poke fun at Nicholas Epley for only recently discovering this fact, or poking fun at you for writing of this discovery as if it’s somehow groundbreaking.
Try empathy. Try seeing the issue as you implicitly suggest in the article. Think about how God would write this article. And think about what that means based upon what you know.

By: tanya luhrmann

tanya luhrmann — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:02:23 +0000

I am a fan of this work, and I think it captures something important about the way people experience God, but I think it follows neither that God is purely a narcissistic projection (though God surely is shaped by a sense of self) nor that people do not pay attention to God. The people of faith that I know do an awful lot of what Thomas a Kempis called imitating Christ: seeking to model their interior world on what they imagine God to be. This takes a lot of work and most people fail, and of course people imagine based on what they know. If the questions had been “I am as good as God wants me to be” I bet people would have differentiated their own response and God’s response–sometimes, depending on the theology, with God giving the more generous answer.

By: Biotunes

Biotunes — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:20:58 +0000

Duh!! Hasn’t it been obvious forever that religion is just an excuse (like any other) for doing whatever the hell you want???

By: Tony Jeremiah

Tony Jeremiah — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:09:23 +0000

In agreement with Chucky:
Epley surveyed commuters at a Boston train station, university undergraduates, and 1,000 adults from a nationally representative database. In every case, he found that people’s own attitudes and beliefs matched those they suggested for God more precisely than those they suggested for the other humans
A few points:
(1a) Was it determined that these people had religious affiliations? If the point of the study was to assess whether God serves as an independent moral compass, assessing the moral opinions of persons having a specific religious affiliation would seem a more direct test of the hypothesis. In other words, asking WWJD seems a pointless question, if prior to asking it, it is determined one is unfamiliar with the philosophies of said religious figure.
(1b) It seems to me that even if theologans were the focus of the study, it is likely their opinion on various morally relevant topics would vary, in addition to their opinions being the same as that of God. So if opinion can vary between theologans (and non-religious persons), but yet be internally consistent (re: God and self), that definitely would suggest moral opinions are indicative of personal interpretations. If opinions do not vary between theologans (and the non-religious), and are also internally consistent, that would be more suggestive of some type of moral compass (possibly Bible related), but, which is usually called conscience.
(2) It would be interesting to see what the results look like with the IAT, given some research suggesting explicit and implicit attitudes can be inconsistent. For example, would people’s implicit attitudes about abortion and same-sex orientations be the same as explicitly-expressed opinions about what God might think?
Given the relevant media-reported scandals, undoubtedly there will be more than one instance of inconsistencies between self and imagined-other opinion.