Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind

Abstract

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people's normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God's unique mind is due, the authors suggest, to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine.

Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation.

“…If this was indeed the case, then an individual difference measure that is designed to tap belief in the potential for external forces to control specific outcomes might moderate the influence of God primes on active goal pursuit. Although previous research suggests that virtually everyone's representation of God includes omnipotence (K. Gray & Wegner, 2010;Kapitan, 1991;Metcalf, 2004), people may vary in terms of the specific outcomes they see as susceptible to the influence of external forces. If so, we should be able measure the extent to which participants see a specific outcome-such as their career success-as susceptible to the influence of external forces like God.…”

“…In addition, experimental work has shown that, when confronted with events that are difficult to explain, people readily turn to God's omnipotence (Gilbert, Brown, Pinel, & Wilson, 2000;K. Gray & Wegner, 2010).…”

“…In addition, several recent psychological findings also suggest that omnipotence is a commonly endorsed feature of God. For example, participants asked to a rate number of entities, including rocks, gadgets, people of different ages, and supernatural beings, along various dimensions deemed God as the ultimate agent-a being solely dedicated to agency (H. M. Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007; see also K. Gray & Wegner, 2010).…”

The ecology of religious beliefs

“…Recent empirical findings indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods not only intensify (22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27), but also promote cooperation (28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33) in situations of increased environmental risk. In addition, these findings indicate that ecological threats can strengthen mechanisms of norm enforcement in human groups (34).…”

Recruiting and pursuing Big Questions in the scientific study of religion

“…How, for example, does apprehension of God's forgiveness differ from receiving interpersonal forgiveness or even self-forgiveness? Addressing this question might provide insight into the cues that people look for in trying to perceive the mind of God (Gray & Wegner, 2010;Wegner & Gray, 2016), the processes involved in building, maintaining, or transforming particular religious attachment schemas (Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2016), or the processes involved in religious conversion or spiritual transformation (Paloutzian, Murken, Streib, & Rößler-Namini, 2013). (Bering, 2002;Hodge, 2011) …”