The Overton Salon

Jesse Bering, who has a new book out called The Belief Instinct asks the question in Slate that  was first asked by Ludwig Feuerbach: is God just a projection of our mind?

His answer is, why yes! We have an overactive imagination! Whereas for Feuerbach, God is a projection of the highest ideals our species onto some other object, Bering says we attribute mental states to things that don’t have them – an adaptive process that was useful at one time, but now has outgrown it’s usefulness – and religion is just that writ large.

Bering’s argument is a typical example of evolutionary psychologists doing two things: hitting the theological mark, as it were, but doing it with the wrong assumptions.

To wit: because have a “theory of mind” and see intentions in objects that have no intentions – your car that you swear isn’t working just to piss you off, or the weather which is just intentionally ruining your vacation, etc. We see “mind” working in places where mind is absent, as it were.

Bering then asks, “What if I were to tell you that God’s mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring.” Could God himself just be a big mental projection of intentions?

If you are familiar with classical theology your immediate answer will be “yes! That’s very similar to what our language about God is like! We analogically project things like ‘knowledge,’ ‘love,’ etc, onto God. When we say “God” we don’t even know WHAT we’re talking about, so this language is are really just scaffolding that helps us to grasp something of this mystery we call ‘God.’”

In other words, Bering is right. God does not have mental states. Humans have them (the incarnation is a different matter – there God does have mental states BECAUSE God is also human).

But Bering is mistaken when he assumes that what we’re doing is attributing mental states to an object, because God is NOT an object. God is no “thing” like my car is a thing. I can attribute mental
states to my car because I see social behavior in lot’s of things, and in classical theology, if you do this about God you are labeled ”idolatrous.” Christian theology uses the term “analogy” to describe
the way we attribute the highest ideals to God – like love, faithfulness, and goodness – but that these attributions fail to reach what God really is.

We are like the infant who tries to express themself to their parent but it comes out as a grunt or crying…