Born Believers by Justin L Barrett

Author:Justin L Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2012-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

The questions we sought to answer with stories such as this one were, Just what kind of idea of God do listeners or readers use to make sense of the story? Is it the same as what they say they believe about God?

To answer these questions, we asked memory questions after our participating adults listened to the stories. (We encouraged the listeners to use their own concept of God as much as possible and directly asked them a number of questions about what properties they thought God has.) Because we were particularly looking for intrusion errors—instances when people remembered something that was not in the story—we asked: “Which of the following pieces of information were included in the story?” Listeners answered simply yes if they remembered it being in the story or no if they did not remember it. We assured our participants that the wording did not have to be exact. Some of the items checked for general memory of the story—for instance, “The boy was swimming alone.” (Do not look back at the passage. Yes or no?) The other items checked for intrusion errors related to ideas about God. For instance, one item read, “God had just finished answering another prayer when God helped the boy.” (Was that in the story? Yes or no?)

What we found using stories and questions like these is that listeners’ intrusion errors revealed that they used a very human-like, or anthropomorphic, understanding of God to make sense of the stories. Did God just finish answering another prayer when God helped the boy? “Yes” was the most common answer. But look again at the story and remember that “God” means someone that can do any number of things anywhere at the same time. Does the story really say that God finished doing one thing and then did another? Couldn’t the story be understood as God continuing to answer the prayer in another part of the world while beginning to help the boy in the river? Sure it could. When we substituted space aliens with superpowers for God in the same stories with a different group of adults, they did not make these kinds of intrusion errors at any higher rate than other kinds of mistakes. But there is something hard about understanding the story with an all-present, all-powerful, nonanthropomorphic God. At least when trying to use our ideas of God in these kinds of tasks, a very human-like concept of God seems easier, more natural.

We conducted these experiments with adults living in the United States from many different religious backgrounds and commitments. Some participants did not believe in God and had to be asked to use their ideas about the God in which they do not believe. (This is not as strange as it sounds. You might not believe in dragons, but you probably have a lot of ideas about what a dragon is.) Across all groups—believers or nonbelievers, Christians or Jews, Catholics or Protestants—everyone showed the same pattern of intrusion errors. They understood

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