There are at least two ways to summarize the latest study out of the Canadian Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture.
The nice way is rather technical. To quote the author, Benjamin Purzycki: “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.”
Another way to summarize it is this: our gods are more moral than your gods. Or at least ‘our gods’ more concerned with moral action.
Using written surveys, Purzycki asked 88 undergraduate students at the University of Connecticut, all of them Christian, about their perceptions of divine knowledge. Some of these questions dealt with morally-charged topics while others focused on the mundane. Does God know how tall I am? Does God know if I cheat on a test? Does God know if I cheat on a test in São Paulo?
Then Purzycki gave a similar survey to ninety Tyvans, Buddhist-animists living in the cities and steppes of Southern Siberia. Does the cher eezi (a powerful local spirit) know what color your house is? Does the cher eezi know if you lie? Does the cher eezi know if you lie in Moscow? In all of these situations, even if the cher eezi knows, does it care?
We might call this discipline theopsychology: what do I think about what the gods think? The researchers found that Tyvans attributed less knowledge about moral activities, and less concern about them, to their deities than the American Christian undergraduates did to theirs. But, although the Tyvans didn’t describe the cher eezi as being especially concerned with moral action, they did tend to think that cher eezi knew and cared more about lying than, say, the color of their eyes. That the cher eezi cares more about moral action than mundane facts.
These findings lead Purzycki to suggest that all religious people, all over the world, have an intuitive tendency to moralize their gods, even if they don’t describe moral policing as an attribute of the deity. As Purzycki points out, the findings also lend support to the theory that smaller, simpler societies require less moral authority from their deities, while an all-seeing moral watchdog makes a lot of sense in the vast anonymity of the industrialized world. In other words, God is a lot like the NSA.
There are a number of reasons to be skeptical of this research. For one, just because something is quantitative doesn’t mean its suited for cross-cultural comparison. Presumably American undergraduates, steeped in academic culture and fresh off the completion of their college applications, approach written evaluations a bit differently, we may assume, than your average Tyvan. Also, as Purzycki observes in passing, it’s possible that his sample set—literate, urban Tyvans living in Russia, a dominantly Christian nation—might be a wee bit influenced by the culture at large, especially when taking foreigners’ surveys. And why is it that, as Purzycki seems to assume, the only difference between the color of a car and the act of lying is moral content? Personally, I find that lying produces certain effects—drama, confusion, a whole lot of effort on the part of the liar—that aren’t strictly moral in character, and that don’t, in general, apply to automotive paint jobs. Maybe the gods just want to watch the human comedy.
Hard data does have its place in the study of religion. But it’s unclear why Purzycki’s findings couldn’t be achieved through old-fashioned ethnographic work. And, once quantitative methods get involved, it becomes a lot easier to sound authoritative and make unfounded comparisons. The gods of Tyvans and undergraduates, it seems, are pretty watchful. It’s less certain whether the gods of academic oversight are paying enough attention.
