Of course God would do what you would do, if only He had the right information!

[elfs]

When we engage in quiet, moral reasoning about what we would do under certain situations, a particular pattern appears in our brains under functional ("live") magnetic resonance imaging. fMRI records what parts of our brain experience a jump in glucose consumption, indicating what parts are doing work. Whatever the underlying mechanism, the pattern is reliable across individuals and across cultural differences: when you think about what you would under a giving circumstance, the same parts of your brain light up, regardless of age, national origin, or ethnicity.

When we engage in quiet, moral reasoning about what other people would do under those same circumstances, other parts of the brain light up. The mental toolkit for modeling what other people might think, do, and how they might behave, is maintained in different locations of the brain from how we reason about ourselves.

Now comes a study out of Stanford that indicates that when we reason about what God might do, the first section lights up: we reason about what God might do by first assuming that God would do what we would do. Unlike "other people," who we know do not have thoughts aligned with our own, our brains operate as if God's thoughts are aligned with our own.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

wow! Fascinating discovery there.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Religion is, regardless of what anyone says otherwise about it, a personal thing. If it isn't personal, it isn't relevant.

I wonder which part of the brain is active when one thinks about what someone else's god would do? And if it makes a difference what religious beliefs the subject holds?

[dossy.livejournal.com]

"I wonder which part of the brain is active when one thinks about what someone else's god would do?"

+1.

"Study 7. Eighteen healthy, right-handed volunteers (8 men, 10 women; age 18 to 45 years, Mdn = 21 years) participated in exchange for $40. Of these, 17 reported believing in God in a prescreening survey and are included in the analyses."

Study 7 is the one that employed the fMRI ... the others in the paper? Apparently not.

Oh, and the atheist they tested, when asked to reason about what a God would do? I wonder how his or her brain lit up.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

I can thankfully say, that every time I have seriously contemplated acts that would make Josef Stalin say, "Day-umn!", I've had that little voice of God in my head saying, "Not cool."

And even in the cases where Miss Manners would cluck, I've often heard Christ laughing at me, saying "Dude! Get with the program."

Hmmm. Does it make me insane? That I have God and Jesus in my head, talking like a pair of California surfer dudes?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Wow. Conclusive evidence that religious whackadoodles think that they're G*d.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Which would imply that for us-humans, God is the universal self?

Stranger than Stranger in a Strange Land :-)

[(Anonymous)]

So it's confirmed that Heinlein _was_ right after all. Thou art God. :-)