Exploring Perceptions of Religion and Science among Turkish Academics

The religiosity of academics has been studied for over a decade. With few exceptions, this research has been conducted on American “elite” scientists, and data from non-Western countries is lacking. Drawing from psychological and sociological literature, the present exploratory study investigates the religiosity of Turkish academics (N = 361) and their perceptions on the relationship between religion and science, and associated variables such as interpretation of the Quran, and belief in evolution and creationism. Moreover, we address criticism directed at previous research by probing for different God concepts among believing academics. Although cultural differences can be identified, the results generally support the idea that academics are less religious with 54% identifying as “less religious” or “not religious,” compared to 24.2% self-identifying as “religious” or “extremely religious.”

Is God Listening to My Prayers? Initial Validation of a Brief Measure of Perceived Divine Engagement and Disengagement in Response to Prayer

Does God listen and respond to prayers? This project provided initial validation for a brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. As part of a larger project on religious/spiritual struggles among U.S. undergraduates, we used Sample 1 (n = 400) for exploratory factor analysis and Sample 2 (n = 413) for confirmatory factor analysis and initial validity testing. A two-factor model with four items per factor provided acceptable fit. On average, participants reported more divine engagement than disengagement. They endorsed items about God listening more than those about God responding. Divine engagement showed strong positive associations with religiousness and positive-valence variables involving God. Divine disengagement showed strong positive associations with variables suggesting divine struggle or distance. Importantly, both subscales also showed evidence of incremental validity: Divine engagement predicted positive-valence God variables (e.g., secure attachment, collaborative religious coping, gratitude to God, and awareness of God) even when controlling for religiousness and positive God concepts and attitudes. Divine disengagement predicted more spiritual struggles and more negative-valence and distance-related God variables (divine struggle, anxious and distant attachment, and self-directing religious coping) even when controlling for doubt about God’s existence, negative God images, anger/disappointment toward God, and concern about God’s disapproval. In short, this brief new measure shows promise as a tool to assess beliefs about God’s responsiveness to prayer.

Negative Theology and Love in Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls

In this paper I examine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls as an illustration of how the two concepts: love and negative theology can be brought together in an unusual spiritual journey. The thesis I develop is that both have the same impetus: a going out of oneself. Love is extasis because it is the going out into the heart of an other; extasis is the central moment in a negative theology when the soul no longer knows either the self or God but is in the same place as, or is united to, God. Following a brief exposition of negative theology, I explain how Porete portrays the soul become what she truly is by falling out of herself under the impetus of love. When the soul is liberated from will and reason her divine lover can be and love in her. In Porete’s falling into the ocean of the Divine, she is made no thing so that her divine lover can be all. Her self-annihilation is the portal to her deification when she is finally changed into God. The continuous hominification of God and divinization of humanity is the eternal process of Love loving Love’s self. Porete focuses on the self rather than on purifying God concepts; it is a relentless stripping the self of all that is creaturely to make the soul an empty dwelling place for Love to reside. Thus, Porete’s is a radical negative theology: she never “knows” God even when she becomes Love’s dwelling place.

Atheism is Global Atheism

Accepting Diller’s challenge to justify “global atheism,” despite its supposed crushing burden of knowledge, this paper argues that the global atheist bears no extraordinary burden. In fact, all atheism is global atheism, as an atheist lacks any and all god-beliefs; while a local theist, who accepts one of the myriad god-beliefs over all others, has a special burden to account for that choice. Surveying the diversity of god-concepts across religions and how atheists dismiss and discard them, this paper provides an inductive and philosophical foundation of global atheism—as well as illustrating that local theisms are more prone to blending and overlapping than allowed in Diller’s scheme.

Animals, Superman, Fairy and God: Children’s Attributions of Nonhuman Agent Beliefs in Madrid and London

There have been major developments in the understanding of children’s nonhuman concepts, particularly God concepts, within the past two decades, with a body of cross-cultural studies accumulating. Relatively less research has studied those of non-Christian faiths or children’s concepts of popular occult characters. This paper describes two studies, one in Spain and one in England, examining 5- to 10-year-olds’ human and nonhuman agent beliefs. Both settings were secular, but the latter comprised a Muslim majority. Children were given a false-belief (unexpected contents) task in which they were asked to infer about three humans (mother, classmate, teacher), three animals (dog, bear, bird) and three supernatural beings (Superman, fairy, God). Similar false beliefs about humans, with subtle differences in inferences about animals and supernatural beings, were found between the two locations. In London different patterns for God between participants with a family religion, in particular Muslims, and non-affiliates, were identified as well as an association between religious beliefs and practice and inferences about God. Findings are discussed in the light of theory and research on the role of sociocultural inputs in children’s theory of mind development and understanding of agency.

The Experimental Investigation of Religious Cognition

Religious cognition may be defined as the cognitive processes and representational states involved in religion-related knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, behaviours, and experience. Religious content and information processing occurs both at an intellectual, propositional level and also at an affect-laden, implicational level. Many questions are unanswered in our understanding of religious cognition, but fundamental to them all is the question of how religious cognition can be measured. Psychology of religion has primarily used questionnaires to measure religious belief, but many limitations suggest the need for new methods that can tap into implicational religious cognition, such as God schemas, as well as propositional religious cognition, such as God concepts. The purpose of this investigation was to explore which experimental paradigms most successfully tap into implicational religious cognition, and thereby add a new set of measurement tools to those available to the psychologist of religion. A consideration of research into the schematic representation of self and other persons suggested multiple hypotheses that could be tested using experimental paradigms adapted from the social cognition and cognition and emotion literatures. I present findings from a series of five experiments that measured cognitive biases in attention, memory, and judgement speed that were hypothesized to result from implicational religious cognition.Two experiments adapted the emotional Stroop paradigm to explore the possibility of a religious Stroop effect. While evangelical Christians, non-evangelical Christians, and atheists did not differ in interference when colour-naming emotionally valent religious material, in a subsequent unexpected recall test evangelicals showed enhanced recall for religious but not control material. Three experiments adapted the self-reference effect paradigm to investigate the accessibility and centrality of God schemas relative to self-schemas. Though evangelical and non-evangelical Christians had relatively similar propositional beliefs about the character of God, the pattern of evangelicals’ speed in making God-referent judgements and subsequent recall of God-referent material suggested that their God schemas were better-elaborated, more efficient, and more affect-laden than those of non-evangelicals. Atheists were able to draw consistently on two different concepts of God, but did so slowly and with poor subsequent recall, indicating that their God schemas were poorly elaborated, inefficient, and affect-free.Though much research exploring these biases is still to be done, the findings of the current investigation suggest that incidental memory and judgement speed paradigms are successful in tapping into implicational religious cognition and can reveal differences not otherwise observable through more direct measurement.

God, concepts of

We think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect and deserving of worship. Such a conception is common to both Eastern and Western religions. Some trace this to human psychology or sociology: Freud regarded God as a wish-fulfilling projection of a perfect, comforting father-figure; Marxists see belief in God as arising from the capitalist structure of society. Believers, however, trace their belief to religious experience, revealed or authoritative texts, and rational reflection. Philosophers flesh out the concept of God by drawing inferences from God’s relation to the universe (‘first-cause theology’) and from the claim that God is a perfect being. ‘Perfect-being’ theology is the more fundamental method. Its history stretches from Plato and Aristotle, through the Stoics, and into the Christian tradition as early as Augustine and Boethius; it plays an important role in underwriting such ontological arguments for God’s existence as those of Anselm and Descartes. It draws on four root intuitions: that to be perfect is perfectly to be, that it includes being complete, that it includes being all-inclusive, and that it includes being personal. Variously balanced, these intuitions yield our varied concepts of God. Criticisms of perfect-being theology have focused both on the possibility that the set of candidate divine perfections may not be consistent or unique, and doubts as to whether human judgment can be adequate for forming concepts of God. Another problem with the method is that different accounts of perfection will yield different accounts of God: Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, for instance, appear to have held that God would be the more perfect for lacking some knowledge, while most Christian writers hold that perfection requires omniscience. Views of God’s relation to the universe vary greatly. Pantheists say that God is the universe. Panentheists assert that God includes the universe, or is related to it as soul to body. They ascribe to God the limitations associated with being a person – such as limited power and knowledge – but argue that being a person is nevertheless a state of perfection. Other philosophers, however, assert that God is wholly different from the universe. Some of these think that God created the universe ex nihilo, that is, from no pre-existing material. Some add that God conserves the universe in being moment by moment, and is thus provident for his creatures. Still others think that God ‘found’ some pre-existing material and ‘creates’ by gradually improving this material – this view goes back to the myth of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, and also entails that God is provident. By contrast, deists deny providence and think that once God made it, the universe ran on its own. Still others argue that God neither is nor has been involved in the world. The common thread lies in the concept of perfection: thinkers relate God to the universe in the way that their thoughts about God’s perfection make most appropriate.

God, concepts of

Those whose conceptions of God stem from the major Eastern and Western religions think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect and deserving of worship. Such a conception is common to both Eastern and Western religions. Some trace this to human psychology or sociology: Freud regarded God as a wish-fulfilling projection of a perfect, comforting father-figure; Marxists see belief in God as arising from the capitalist structure of society; recent work in cognitive science traces it to various cognitive mechanisms that humans have evolved. Believers, however, trace their belief to religious experience, revealed or authoritative texts, and rational reflection. Philosophers flesh out the concept of God by drawing inferences from God’s relation to the universe (‘first-cause theology’) and from the claim that God is a perfect being. ‘Perfect-being’ theology is the more fundamental method. Its history stretches from Plato and Aristotle, through the Stoics, and into the Christian tradition as early as Augustine and Boethius; it plays an important role in underwriting such ontological arguments for God’s existence as those of Anselm and Descartes. It draws on four root intuitions: that to be perfect is perfectly to be, that it includes being complete, that it includes being all-inclusive, and that it includes being personal. Variously balanced, these intuitions yield our varied concepts of God. Criticisms of perfect-being theology have focused both on the possibility that the set of candidate divine perfections may not be consistent or unique, and doubts as to whether human judgment can be adequate for forming concepts of God. Another problem with the method is that different accounts of perfection will yield different accounts of God: Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, for instance, appear to have held that God would be the more perfect for lacking some knowledge, while most Christian writers hold that perfection requires omniscience. Views of God’s relation to the universe vary greatly. Pantheists say that God is the universe. Panentheists assert that God includes the universe, or is related to it as soul to body.They ascribe to God the limitations associated with being a person – such as limited power and knowledge – but argue that being a person is nevertheless a state of perfection. Other philosophers, however, assert that God is wholly different from the universe. Some of these think that God created the universe ex nihilo, that is, from no pre-existing material. Some add that God conserves the universe in being moment by moment, and is thus provident for his creatures. Still others think that God ‘found’ some pre-existing material and ‘creates’ by gradually improving this material – this view goes back to the myth of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, and also entails that God is provident. By contrast, deists deny providence and think that once God made it, the universe ran on its own. Still others argue that God neither is nor has been involved in the world. The common thread lies in the concept of perfection: thinkers relate God to the universe in the way that their thoughts about God’s perfection make most appropriate.