Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts

Barrett, Justin L.; Keil, Frank C.

doi:10.1006/cogp.1996.0017

Cited by 621 publications

(372 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Evidently, even attributes that are not listed explicitly by the majority of people for a given concept can nevertheless push imaginative creations in the direction of correlated properties from that concept. This divergence between explicit listing and a more indirect projection of properties via imagination is also consistent with Barrett and Keil's (1996) observation that people who explicitly endorse a doctrine of an omnipotent God nevertheless make indirect, inference-based memory errors that reveal a concept of a more anthropomorphic and limited God. In other words, people indirectly project onto EXPERIMENT 4 Table 3 Attributes and Their Centrality to the Concept Human their concept of God properties that are different from those that they explicitly endorse.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

et al. 2000

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Participants' representations of the concept human were examined to differentiate three types of associations between concepts and their component attributes: the capacity of concepts to cue attributes (attribute accessibility), the capacity of attributes to cue concepts (instance accessibility), and the extent to which attributes are thought of as central to concepts (attribute centrality), The findings provide information about the concept human itself and, more generally, about the functionally distinct roles those different attribute-concept associations play in guiding imaginative thought. College students listed attributes that differentiate humans from other animals, rated the centrality of those attributes, and listed animals that possess those attributes. Other students drew and described extraterrestrials that possessed some of the attributes that were found to vary across those listing and rating tasks, Rated centrality was the most important determinant of an attribute's impact on imaginative generation. When the imagined extraterrestrials were supposed to possess attributes that had been rated as central to humans (intelligence, emotional complexity, or opposable thumbs), participants projected more aspects of human form onto them than when the creatures were supposed to possess less central attributes or when attributes were unspecified.Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts ... We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.-Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent ofMan, 1973

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

et al. 2000

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“…While most theorists, including myself, agree that abstruse theological doctrines are unintuitive (Barrett, 1999;McCauley, 2011), much empirical work supports the idea that popular representations of the supernatural are culturally successful because they trigger and are processed by intuitive systems that evolved for other purposes. This intuitive by--product view of religious representations is supported by anthropological fieldwork (Boyer, 2001), experimental psychology (Barrett and Keil, 1996;Atran andNorenzayan 2004a, 2004b), and empirically based theory (McCauley, 2011). …”

Section: Intuitive Religious Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two paradigms for religious representation: The physicist and the playground (a reply to Levy)

Leeuwen

2017

Cognition

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“…The instability of belief in otherworldly and transcendent beings is consistent with contemporary psychological research. Psychologists Justin Barrett and Frank Keil performed a series of experiments that examined various conceptions of God held by religious individuals (see, for example, Barrett et al, 1996). Barrett and Keil presented college students with stories involving God, then asked them questions about the stories to ascertain their conceptions of God.…”

Section: Blameless Non-beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Unimportance of Theistic Belief

Megill

Linford²

2017

EPH

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We first argue that there are cases of "blameless non-belief." That is, some people-through no fault of their own-fail to enter into a conscious relationship with God. But if so, then it would be unjust of God to make certain particular goods (e.g., one's salvation, the possibility of an ethical or a meaningful life, or entrance into heaven) depend upon one having a conscious relationship with God. So, given that God is just, then despite what some theists believe, a relationship with God (even assuming that God exists) cannot be a necessary condition for the attainment of these goods; there might, e.g., be atheists in heaven, even assuming that theism is true. This implies that religion is a far less important component of people's lives than many might think.

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Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts

Cited by 621 publications

References 28 publications

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

Two paradigms for religious representation: The physicist and the playground (a reply to Levy)

On the Unimportance of Theistic Belief

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