God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues.
"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," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.
Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people.
"People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want," the team write. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
I think this is very useful research, as the way our beliefs, and the stories we tell to authenticate those beliefs, influences our actions is, for me, one of the prime functions of mythology, and highly overlooked in our polarized age. I think it is very important right now to look at the way the stories we tell influence us, as culturally we are aflood with stories telling us all kinds of wondrous and troubling things. Violence in video games is just the tip of the iceberg. It's not surprising though to find that God is less a moral compass than a sounding board; people have been using the concept of an ultimate reference for this purpose since we've been able to conceive of such an "objective" stance. The difference I think though is that originally (as conceived in both ancient Greece and theology), God was a sounding board for our conception of the largest possible scope of reference and goodness, that is, one which was bigger than our individual perspectives and could thus serve as a map or guide to them. Nowadays though the popular conception of God has become much smaller, inimical to a total perspective of belief, and very specific beliefs have been attached to the attendant texts and rituals that support belief in God (ie: all the dogma and hatred and ignorance of religious fundamentalists that are in us and not in It). Unfortunately it seems that we have grown to believe more in the one-sided interpretations that have codified over history than in the total set of possibilities inherent in an ultimate god belief, and as such project those back on that image in order to reinforce these negative views.
As always, it is important to remember that whether or not you believe that we are created by God, we create gods ourselves through our belief in them, which allows us to believe in ourselves. As I like to put it, gods are solely everything that has been said or believed about them or has been done in their names.
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