Why God has a human mind

Jesus was a human, fathered by a god and born to a virgin. He died for three days and was resurrected. His death was a sacrifice, an offering or propitiation. It brings favor for humans. He lives now in a realm where other supernatural beings interact with each other and sometimes intervene in human affairs.

Gradually the mainstream of the American public is becoming aware that none of these elements is unique to Christianity. Symbologists or scholars who specialize in understanding ancient symbols, tell us that the orthodox Jesus story, as it appears in our gospels, follows a specific sacred or mythic template that existed in the Ancient Near East long before Christianity or even Judaism. In part this is due to the flow of history. Religions emerge out of ancestor religions. Though the characters and details merge and morph, elements get carried through that allow us to track the lineage. The Gilgamesh and Noah flood-hero stories are similar because the Hebrew story descended from the Sumerian story . The same can be said of the Sumerian “Descent of Inana” and the Christian resurrection story. Even religions that exist side by side borrow elements from each other -- a process called syncretism.

But another reason for similarities among religious stories is that all of them are carried by human minds. To quote cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer, “Evolution by natural selection gave us a particular kind of mind so that only particular kinds of religious notions can be acquired. (p. 4) . . . All human beings can easily acquire a certain range of religious notions and communicate them to others” (Religion Explained, p. 3) Our supernatural notions are shaped by the built-in structures that let us acquire, sort, and access information efficiently, especially information about other people.

You may have heard the old adage: If dogs had a god, God would be a dog; if horses had a god, God would be a horse . . . . Humans are more inventive than dogs and horses, and not all human gods or magical beings have human bodies. They do, however, have human psyches—minds with quirks and limitations that are peculiar to our species. Philosopher John Locke believed that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. We now know this not to be the case. (Leda, Principle 4). Because we need to learn so much so fast, certain assumptions are actually built in. This allows us to generalize from a few bits of data to a big fund of knowledge. It lets us know more than we have actually experienced or been told.

Let me give you an example that will illustrate the point. If I tell you that my "guarg," Annie, just made a baby by laying an egg and sitting on it, your brain says: Guargs (not just Valerie’s guarg) are non-human animals that reproduce by laying eggs. You have different categories in your brain for animal reproductive systems, and putting one guarg in the egg laying category puts them all there. To oversimplify, we have a built in filing system. Most of the labels actually start out blank, but some of them don’t. The preprinted labels appear to include: human, non-human animal, plant, man-made object, natural object.

A large percentage of our mental architecture is specialized “domain specific” structures for processing information about other humans. We homo sapiens sapiens are social information specialists; that is our specialized niche in this world. Our survival and wellbeing depend mostly on smarts rather than teeth, claws, stealth or an innate sense of direction, and most of the information we need to survive and flourish comes from other humans. Our greatest threats also come from our own species--people who seek to out-compete, exploit or kill us. For this reason, our brains are optimized to process information from and about other humans.

How does all of this affect religion? More...