All around us during the Christmas season are images of God taking human form. A divine baby boy conceived by the Holy Spirit and a virgin mother, born in a stable in Bethlehem two millennia ago. A boy who grows into a man, who teaches widely, who is brutally killed.

In most Christian traditions, God is the Holy Trinity—made up of the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. Each is distinct, but they co-exist as one. Under this faith, the Trinity exists forever, is all-powerful, and all-knowing.

While these representations of God are quite abstract, is there something to the idea that we view God as having some human properties, like the baby, the adult teacher, or the father?

This is where cognitive psychology meets religion.

A recent article by researchers Michael Barlev, Spencer Mermelstein, and Tamsin German in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review suggests that people’s representation of “evolutionarily new” concepts like God, the work of geological processes, or the idea of an infinite universe, might be formed from more primitive concepts. In the case of God, the idea is that we form the abstract concept by building up from the concept of “person”—with its associated physical, biological, and psychological intuitions.

In line with this idea, children younger than 5 years old attribute some of the same properties to God as to individual people (e.g., mom has limited knowledge of the world, and so God has limited knowledge of the world, too). But after age 5, children begin attributing different properties to God than to individuals (e.g., unlike individuals, God has extraordinary knowledge).

Does this initial human-like representation of God fade away after people acquire a more abstract representation (body-less, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful)? Or do these two representations continue to co-exist?

To find out, Barlev and colleagues recruited a sample of people who had a lifetime (in some cases more than 80 years!) of experience with an abstract God concept, to test whether these people still retained traces of a human-like God concept. If the intuition that God has human properties fades with experience, then older people should show fewer traces of this intuition.

The study

The researchers recruited participants with varying experience with the Christian tradition, and therefore with the abstract God concept. Participants ranged from 18 to 87 years old, and most were Roman Catholic and grew up Roman Catholic. This means that people’s experience with mainstream Christian ideas of God ranged from under 20 years to over 80 years for the oldest participants.

Participants did not take their faith lightly. Eighty five percent of participants identified themselves as moderately or very religious, and 90% as moderately or very spiritual.

To find out if traces of an intuition that God is human-like remained, participants were asked a series of questions that probed their beliefs.

For each belief domain, there were four matched True/False questions. For two of the questions, an intuition that God has human-like properties was consistent with Christian belief. For example, the statement “God can hear what I say out loud,” is true both under the intuition and the belief, whereas the statement “God can’t hear what I say out loud,” is false under both.

For two of the four questions, the intuition that God has human-like properties was inconsistent with beliefs of Christian doctrine. For example, the statement “God can’t hear what I say to myself,” is true under the intuition but false under the religious belief, while the statement “God can hear what I say to myself” is true under the religious belief but false under the intuition.

The key outcomes of interest were people’s accuracy in categorizing statements as correctly true or false and their reaction time in doing so. The researchers calculated participants’ accuracy cost of replying to inconsistent (as compared to consistent) statements. They also calculated participants’ reaction time cost of replying to inconsistent (as compared to consistent) statements.

An underlying intuition that God is human-like

Participants’ responses revealed a conflict between an intuition that God is human-like and the beliefs of Christian doctrine. Participants were 7% less accurate when responding to statements in which intuition and religious belief were inconsistent, like “God can hear what I say to myself,” than to ones where the two were aligned. Participants were also slower in responding to inconsistent than to consistent statements, suggesting an underlying tension between intuition and belief.

If initial intuitions about God being human-like were replaced by the abstract religious view over a lifetime of belief, then the conflict between consistent and inconsistent statements should diminish with age. But that’s not what the researchers found. There were no trends in this direction in the cost to accuracy or in the cost to reaction time across the lifespan.

For example, as you can see in the graph below, the accuracy difference between consistent and inconsistent statements remained steady with age.

It may be true even of Sunday school teachers

There were a few interesting case studies in the pool of participants sampled for this research. Three participants had Master’s degrees in theology and had taught religion in different contexts—one in a religious school, one in a youth ministry, and one in a church. All three of these participants showed a slow-down for inconsistent (vs. consistent) statements, and two of three showed an accuracy cost for inconsistent statements. Thus even strong commitment and massive experience did not eradicate the intuition that God is human-like.

The belief that God is body-less, omnipresent, and omniscient does not appear to replace the belief that God is human-like. Even among people with more than 80 years of Christian belief, or those teaching religious beliefs to others, an underlying tension between intuition and belief remains.

Psychonomics article featured in this post:

Barlev, M., Mermelstein, S., & German, T. C. (2018). Representational coexistence in the God concept: Core knowledge intuitions of God as a person are not revised by Christian theology despite lifelong experience. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 2330–2338. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-017-1421-6.