Bill McKee

The cognitive science of religion has made significant progress in explaining how general human cognitive tendencies give rise to concepts of invisible, powerful, and knowing agents. What these accounts do not fully explain is how the four-feature god concept — adding benevolent responsiveness to human solicitation to the three features already accounted for — could have arisen simultaneously from a single lived experience rather than by piecemeal cultural assembly. This paper proposes such an account. An elder in a pre-religious clan, rather than resisting a problem, elects to accept it fully and deal with its consequences as they arrive. She notices that when she adopts this strategy of acceptance, unexpected events frequently solve the problem for her. It occurs to her that there must be an invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful being willing to solve her problems when she trusts it to do so. She has inferred all four features of the god concept — invisibility, omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolent responsiveness — simultaneously from a single repeating experience, without prior religious instruction and without tacking benevolence onto a pre-existing concept of a powerful agent. The subjectivity objection — that she has fooled herself — is rebutted by the structure of the experience: the resolution arrives not when she expects it but only after she has abandoned any expectation of it. The scenario is distinguished from petitionary prayer, connected to the near-universal religious critique of egotism, and compared to the ontological argument.

Beliefs can subjectively shape our perception of the external world so as to reflect and confirm themselves. To deter this, scientists objectively suspend their beliefs so that they perceive, not what they believe or expect, but what is actually there. No raw perception is exonerated from doubt and no scientist is considered immune to bias. This paper asks what the implications would be if even the initial perception that the world is external arose from some unacknowledged belief. It may be that the ego is merely a belief that we are autonomous observers of the world, and that this belief is reflected in the illusory perception that the world is external. If so, then suspending that belief should dissolve the perception of externality and reveal a non-dual reality in which self and world are unified. This echoes the mystical experience of oneness, and is achieved in the same way, by relinquishing our attachment to the self. Thus, idealist realism proposes, not that the external world is not real, but that the real world is not external. This unity of self and world might also account for a second religious phenomenon — divine intervention, the solicitude of the world toward those who trust and accept it rather than resisting it by acting to compel it to change. Finally, the paper proposes a conventional experiment designed to evaluate the hypothesis that externality reflects autonomy.

Beliefs can subjectively shape our perception of the external world so as to reflect and confirm themselves. To deter this, scientists objectively suspend their beliefs so that they perceive, not what they believe or expect, but what is actually there. No raw perception is exonerated from doubt and no scientist is considered immune to bias. This paper asks what the implications would be if even the initial perception that the world is external arose from some unacknowledged belief. It may be that the ego is merely a belief that we are autonomous observers of the world, and that this belief is reflected in the illusory perception that the world is external. If so, then suspending that belief should dissolve the perception of externality and reveal a non-dual reality in which self and world are unified. This echoes the mystical experience of oneness, and is achieved in the same way, by relinquishing our attachment to the self. Thus, idealist realism proposes, not that the external world is not real, but that the real world is not external. This unity of self and world might also account for a second religious phenomenon — divine intervention, the solicitude of the world toward those who trust and accept it rather than resisting it by acting to compel it to change. Finally, the paper proposes a conventional experiment designed to evaluate the hypothesis that externality reflects autonomy.