People think god agrees with them

It’s not a new idea that people construct their god based on whoever they are. Nice people, nice god. Horrible people, horrible god. Homophobic people, homophobic god. The god of the Hebrews was obsessed with details about animal sacrifice. The Christian god is obsessed with the sexual behaviour of other people. What else do you need to be convinced that gods are a creation of their people?

But even if you’d already cottoned on to this idea, it’s still exciting to see it verified experimentally.

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.
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Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality. But Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says, “Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”

When people changed their opinions, they thought god changed his opinions, too.

In another study, Epley got people to manipulate themselves. He asked 59 people to write and perform a speech about the death penalty, which either matched their own beliefs or argued against them. The task shifted people’s attitudes towards the position in their speech, either strengthening or moderating their original views. And as in the other experiments, their shifting attitudes coincided with altered estimates of God’s attitudes (but not those of other people).

And finally, they used fMRI to detect any differences in brain activity when considering their opinion and god’s opinion. The difference being ‘none’.

The takeaway: people get themselves and their god mixed up. You’d think it would be a warning sign when your god agrees with you all the time. Maybe they just think they’re really ‘in tune’.