What Americans Think God Looks Like-And the Science Behind It
Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used an innovative technique to reconstruct what the average American Christian thinks God looks like.
The results, published in the journal PLOS One ¹, offer a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of religious belief and how our own biases shape our perceptions of the divine.
The study ¹ involved 511 Christian participants who were shown hundreds of randomly varying face pairs and asked to select which face from each pair most closely resembled their image of God.
By combining all the selected faces, the researchers assembled a composite “face of God” for each person.
Surprisingly, the resulting faces depicted a God who appeared younger and more feminine than the stern, elderly, white-bearded man often portrayed in popular culture. This challenges the conventional imagery of God that has been perpetuated by centuries of art and literature.
The study also found that people’s political affiliations played a role in how they visualized God. Conservatives tended to imagine a more Caucasian and powerful-looking God, while liberals saw God as more loving and feminine in appearance.
According to the researchers, these differences might stem from the kind of societies that liberals and conservatives envision. Conservatives may prefer a powerful God who can maintain an orderly society, while liberals may favor a more tolerant, loving God to preside over a more inclusive community.
Perhaps the most intriguing finding was that people tended to perceive God as resembling themselves. Older participants envisioned an older God, more attractive participants saw a more attractive God, and African Americans imagined a God that looked more African American.
This reflects an egocentric bias, where we project our own traits and beliefs onto others, including our conceptions of God. “People believe in a God who not only thinks like them, but also looks like them,” explained Professor Kurt Gray, the study’s senior author.
The study sheds light on the deeply personal nature of religious belief and how our individual experiences, identities, and biases shape the way we imagine and relate to the divine. It also highlights the incredible diversity of religious views, even within a single faith tradition like Christianity.
Personally, I'm leaning towards...
As we grapple with questions of faith and spirituality, this research invites us to reflect on our own assumptions and to recognize the complex psychological and cultural factors that influence our understanding of God.
16 comments:
Dennis,
The views of who God is do not form a monolith but rather a matrix. We can take views of the self, views of politics, views of race and for all I know, views of economics and form a multi-dimensional matrix of the characteristics of God. We can overlay all this complexity with the findings of Froese and Bader. They discovered that North Americans believe in four distinct Gods: an Authoritative God, a Benevolent God, a Critical God and a Distant God. So how many cells does the matrix have? Hard to tell.
Then along came William P. Young and in his novel The Shack he characterized God as a heavy-set Black woman. I think that really got under the skin of some White evangelicals. Some commenter on this blog made some racist remarks and I wrote to him and threatened that I was going to pray that God would forever appear to him as comedienne Mom’s Mabley. I don’t think I ever did though.
For generic humans, God tends to be a topic for fictionalizing. I came across a volume in a library published long ago that asserted that God created White people but Blacks evolved from animals – like Tolkiens orcs. I heard at least one Armstrongist assert that Blacks were “pre-Adamic.” That was the kind of God they worshipped. It is like they did not look in the Bible to find God but rather looked in a mirror.
For those who are Christians, we know about God only what he wants us to know. No more, no less. We do not have the ability to probe beyond the boundaries that he has set. And as for his form, he is spirit so he can look however he wants in the physical realm – even a whirlwind.
Scout
We all make God into our own image.
Maybe that's why God said to make no images of Him.
We know most of what needs to be known about God. After all, psychology is a study of the mind of God. Many ministers in all denominations sneer at psychology since to them the ideal Christian is a Borg drone. They have the fantasy that if everyone was their mindless puppet, there would be heaven on earth. God has granted them this desire via North Korea. In North Korea, there's no "cheating" to make tyranny "work" by leeching off the freedom component in western societies.
To me, God is best described as being "G.I." (Genuine Intelligence).
Of course, Christians throughout the ages have understood that God doesn't "look like" anything or anyone, because in his divinity he is spirit and not physical, despite artistic portrayals.
That's why, for example, to ridicule Christians as believing in the caricature of a God looking like an old man (perhaps resembling Karl Marx) sitting on clouds is so stupid. That's not the God Christians believe in. I would make fun of that, too.
Not sure why, but I never or ardly hever picture God in a form.
So true.
Ezekiel 1:26 "Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man."
So what's all this nonsense of God not having a form.
Anonymous 1:39 wrote, "So what's all this nonsense of God not having a form."
Here's the drill:
Christian: "God does not have a body."
Armstrongist: Cites an Old Testament scripture which describes God having
a body.
Christian: "That is a theophany."
Armstrongist: "But it says right there in the Bible that the prophet saw the
figure of a man. The Bible says it. Just read it."
Christian: "The Bible also says that God is a pillar of fire. And we all know he
is not. What you are reading is a metaphor of God - a theophany."
My guess is that this drill has never changed the mind of a single Armstrongist. They have been so profoundly indoctrinated that they have lost the ability to think critically and analytically.
One of the many blog essays on this topic:
https://armstrongismlibrary.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-transcendence-of-god-and.html
Scout
Looks like a young Elon Musk.
At some point, I believe many CoG members pictured God as a spiritually glorified version of HWA.
Well, if Jesus says God has a form I'll take His word for it - John 5:37.
Anonymous 9:13 wrote, "Well, if Jesus says God has a form I'll take His word for it - John 5:37"
Be careful about what is being said. God can have any form he wants. For Job he was a whirlwind that had a voice. These appearances in different forms are called theophanies.
What is being said is that God does not have a form IN HIS ESSENCE. Sorry for the HWA caps but it is easy to skip over that qualification. When Jesus made the statement in John 5:37 to the Jews, he was speaking of a theophany. God is Spirit and the only thing that a human being might possibly see is a theophany - an appearance that is in our reality that we can sense.
Scout
Well yes - does God need two legs to balance upon a surface he adheres to via gravity? Does God live in an atmosphere and therefore need ears to detect sound within an atmosphere by an array of membranes and bones? Does God need a nose to bring molecules to olfactory organs to smell by bringing this atmosphere into his cilia-lined nose? Does God need eyeballs, with their lenses, fluid and retinas, as well as an adjustable iris to adjust to high and low light levels and eyelids to make sure the eyeballs stay lubricated? According to Psalm 91, he even has wings - and feathers for increasing the lift and drag for better movement of air in an atmosphere.
So what you're really telling me is that God lives in an environment with a dense atmosphere, gravity, variable light and humidity. You're telling me that he's ground-bound unless he flaps his feathered wings with effort, and that he has a physical structure with tissues, bones, muscles and hair. None of this picture being painted really screams omnipotence to me...
Human beings are nothing more than atoms and molecules bouncing around. It is God who lives in the 'real world'.
As the world is ultimately temporary why do argue over what you can ultimately only see through a 'darkened glass' as the rest of us can ?
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