This is so interesting and eye opening. Do you know who conducted the study?
., download and read it., but the problem with that paper is neurological imaging data and coupling of that data with the brains that have religious beliefs. let me put the introduction and their ideas of that publication here..
Religion appears to serve as a moral compass for the vast majority of people around the world. It informs whether same-sex marriage is love or sin, whether war is an act of security or of terror, and whether abortion rights represent personal liberty or permission to murder. Many religions are centered on a god (or gods) that has beliefs and intentions, with adherents encouraged to follow “God's will” on everything from martyrdom to career planning to voting. Within these religious systems, how do people know what their god wills?
When people try to infer other people's attitudes and beliefs, they often do so egocentrically by using their own beliefs as an inductive guide (1). This research examines the extent to which people might also reason egocentrically about God's beliefs. We predicted that people would be consistently more egocentric when reasoning about God's beliefs than when reasoning about other people's beliefs. Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber that reverberates one's own beliefs.
The Jewish and Christian traditions state explicitly that God created man in his own image, but believers and nonbelievers alike have long argued that people seem to create God in their own image as well (2–5). Xenophanes (sixth century B.C.E.), for instance, coined the term anthropomorphsim when noting the similarity between religious believers and representations of their gods, with Greek gods being fair skinned and African gods being dark skinned (6). Voltaire reports a Pope as saying, “If God made us in His own image, we have certainly returned the favor” (7). And Bob Dylan (
sang of the ease with which groups come to believe that God is “on our side.” Egocentric representations of God are frequently discussed in public discourse, but are rarely the topic of scientific inquiry. This research examines the strength of such egocentric representations by measuring the extent to which people's own beliefs guide their predictions about God's beliefs. This research does not in any way, however, deny the possibility that the inverse process of reflection (using God's presumed beliefs as a guide to one's own) may operate in contexts where people's own beliefs are uncertain or unknown.
Although religious agents are attributed many unique properties, people nevertheless conceive of them in surprisingly humanlike ways (4, 9, 10). Inferences about a religious agent's beliefs may therefore be guided by the same two sources of information used to reason about other people's beliefs (11–15). The first source is one's own beliefs. Conservatives, for instance, tend to assume that the average person is more conservative than do liberals (16–18). Inferences about other people's beliefs are often based at least partly on one's own beliefs (1, 14). The second source is semantic or episodic knowledge about the target. This knowledge may come from group-based stereotypes (e.g., Texans are conservative; Californians are liberal), from observations of behavior, or from third-person reports. It is easy to guess that Barack Obama has relatively liberal beliefs, for instance, because he is a Democrat, because he expresses liberal beliefs, and because his colleagues say he is liberal.
Religious believers can use both sources of information when reasoning about a religious agent. People can readily recall or construct their own beliefs on an issue and can also consult texts (e.g., the Koran, Torah, or Bible) or presumed experts (e.g., an Imam or Priest) that report on God's beliefs. Like inferences about people, inferences about God's beliefs are therefore likely to reflect a mixture of egocentric and nonegocentric information.
Unlike inferences about people, however, inferences about God's beliefs cannot rely as readily on information directly from the judgment target. One can quiz neighbors on their beliefs, read editorials about celebrities' positions, or observe public opinion polls. Religious agents do not lend themselves to public opinion polling. Even within Christianity, for example, groups differ quite dramatically in their interpretation of God's attitudes toward such topics as same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and abortion. The inherent ambiguity of God's beliefs on major issues and the extent to which religious texts may be open to interpretation and subjective evaluation, suggests not only strong egocentric biases when reasoning about God, but also that people may be consistently more egocentric when reasoning about God's beliefs than when reasoning about other people's beliefs. When the beliefs of a positively evaluated target are relatively ambiguous, a person may construct them by relying on his or her own beliefs (19). Indeed, it may seem particularly logical to use egocentric information when reasoning about God, because religious agents are generally presumed to hold true beliefs, and people generally presume that their own beliefs are true as well (20).
We tested this basic hypothesis that people would be especially egocentric when reasoning about God's beliefs using correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging methods. We investigate important social and moral beliefs on which believers are likely to consider God's beliefs more consistently, rather than more minor and idiosyncratic beliefs. Although our theoretical predictions apply to any religious or supernatural agent presumed to have beliefs (4), our experimental participants are drawn primarily from the United States and therefore cannot represent the entire corpus of world religions. The vast majority of participants from these samples also report believing in God. We exclude nonbelievers from analyses, except where we have a sufficiently large sample for independent analysis (Study 4), primarily because our hypotheses are relevant only to believers. Including the relatively small number of nonbelievers in the other studies, however, does not meaningfully alter any conclusions suggested by the following analyses.
I don't know what that guy with glasses doing there in the post ., but it is not there in the paper..
Topic: Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric...