God: A brief history with a cognitive explanation of the concept (by Ilkka Pyysiäinen)

[Alex]

God: A brief history with a cognitive explanation of the concept
Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Temenos. Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion. Volume 41, issue 1.
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/God.pdf

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Smith (2001, 143-145) suggests that Yahweh became the sole god of Israel in three overlapping stages of development. First, El was the original chief god. Then he became the head of an early Israelite pantheon, with Yahweh as its warrior-god. In the third phase, El and Yahweh were identified as a single god. ...The present practice of Western believers and scholars of religion of speaking of a single 'God' would have been incomprehensible for the ancient Israelites (and possibly even to early Christians). They were not dealing with a universal category with only one member in it but rather with different kinds of beings with differing names (such as El and Yahweh).

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The Old Testament narratives describing the deeds of Yahweh partly reflect people's spontaneous, intuitive way of thinking about gods and other counterintuitive agents (see below).

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It is such cognitive operations and neural processes that also underlie the human capacity to postulate counterintuitive agents. ...A humanlike agent that is not human is counterintuitive in the sense that some of its characteristic features violate panhuman intuitive expectations concerning personal agents, solid objects, and living things.

...Such agent representations as ghosts, children's imaginary companions, fictional agents such as Mickey Mouse, and so forth, all are agents with some non-standard elements. ...the same holds for gods. They are counterintuitive agents in the sense that their representation is carried out by the ordinary cognitive mechanisms, although some of their characteristics violate against panhuman intuitive expectations concerning persons. Yet the believers may find it quite natural that gods exist (cf. Barrett 2003).

There is also empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that the prefrontal system for processing agent causality tends to take over and interfere with folk-mechanical reasoning (see Wegner 2002, 26).

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What unites the various discourses on God is the natural human propensity to take recourse to agentive explanations whenever possible.

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...the psychological basis of the Christian concept of God is in the automatic and intuitive processes that produce agentive explanations for events and structures which manifest control and design.

In the Old Testament religion, the most central idea is the covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites. It is constituted by the duties and privileges of each party, defined according to the model of the relationship between a king and his people; this, in turn, requires the mechanisms of social cognition. Yahweh thus becomes an interested party in human affairs. ...

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...in the ID neocreationism, God is implicitly or explicitly postulated as an explanation for the ordered complexity observed in the nature, without any indication of how the designing has been done and how it could be scientifically studied.

What unites all these discourses is the fact that a feeling that there is order and control in what happens triggers representations of God, whether this is in ancient Israelite folk religion, theology and philosophy of religion, or scientific neocreationism. An increase in the understanding of the universe and its mysteries has always had, and continues to have theological repercussions. This is because previously unknown natural mechanisms have repeatedly been substituted for the religious, agentive explanations. The repercussions are dealt with on two fronts: theologians (and philosophers) make adjustments in theological systems on the basis of new advances in the sciences, while some scientists (and philosophers), inspired by religion, try to introduce new concepts and principles in the sciences.

It is apparent, and not very surprising, that it is precisely evolutionary theory that is the touchstone in the debates between religion and science: this theory concerns not only some specific process or structure in reality but the general principles according to which all forms of life develop on earth, superceding all agentive explanations of this process in explanatory power (see Korthof 2004; Ruse 2003). Natural selection operating on random variation is a simple mechanism that explains the development of life with no need to bring beliefs and desires into the explanation.