For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human-like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct.
The purpose of the study was aimed to explore the trajectory of thoughts and feelings related to religiosity and spirituality using a holistic approach following attendance at group-Quran Recitation (QR) sessions among annual flood victims. This is a qualitative study with an in-depth retrospective interview conducted data in 2019. The purposive sampling was applied to conduct face-to-face individual video-recorded semistructured interviews.
Laypeople often believe that God punishes transgressions; however, their inferences about God's punishment motives remain unclear. We addressed this topic by asking laypeople to indicate God punishes. We also examined participants' inferences about why humans punish to contribute to scholarly conversations regarding the extent to which people may anthropomorphize God's mind.
Not much is known about large-scale brain activation patterns in religious states of mind and previous studies have not set an emphasis on experience. The present study investigated the phenomenon of religious experiences through microstate analysis, and it was the first neurocognitive research to tackle the dimension of experience directly. Hence, a total of 60 evangelical Christians participated in an experiment where they were asked to engage in worship and try to connect with God.
This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent-context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent-child conceptual similarity. Parent-child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated.
The new star of 1572 and the comet of 1577 had a major impact on the ways in which astronomical research developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Behind this gradual but significant change there was an extended epistemological reform which placed increasing emphasis on reason and experience and strove to exclude arguments from Scripture and authority from scientific debate. This paper argues that the humanist debate on astrology after 1577, which was initiated by highly prestigious members of a supraconfessional Republic of Letters, can be seen as an element of this process.
