Comes further progress in understanding the minds of gods. A newly published study:
“The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency,” Benjamin Grant Purzycki [pictured here], Cognition, vol. 129, 2013, pp. 163–179. The author, at the University of British Columbia, Canada, explains:
“The present work is the first study to systematically compare the minds of gods by examining some of the intuitive processes that guide how people reason about them…. These results further demonstrate that there is a significant gulf between expressed beliefs and intuitive religious cognition and provides evidence for a moralization bias of gods’ minds.”
Here is further detail from the study, about a god named God: rotating factor loadings plots of (1) God’s concern and (2) God’s knowledge:
Christian Jarrett, in Research Digest, discusses the academic merits of this study.
(Thanks to investigator Reto Schneider for bringing this to our attention.)
BONUS: For a more detailed, and perhaps more readable, study of the same subject, see also the writings of Neil Gaiman [pictured here].
BONUS: Professor Purzycki’s “Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: A Rationalist Approach“