Is Santa a god? (part 1)

Santa is a god or not. I do want to just have a couple of quick reminders here as we dive into this one. First of all, uh, yes, this episode it has to do with Santa, But if you are attempted to listen to it outside of the holiday season, no worries, because there's gonna be a lot of talk that does not directly apply to Santa Claus. Sure, this

is an episode about the cognitive science of religion. And secondly, we will be discussing the magic of Santa Claus in this episode, so just keep that in mind, parents, if

you're listening with your children. Sure, alright, So most of us would not say that Santa Claus is a god, right, I mean, we we don't necessarily maybe we're not always able to define God in a dictionary definition kind of way, but you have an intuitive sense of how this word is used, and for some reason, Santa Claus doesn't usually

fit into that definition, right, that intuitive definition. Right, even if you are, let's say, a child who is a Santa fundamentalist who believes in, you know, very literally in Santa Claus, even then I don't think they would necessarily confuse the the idea of Santa Claus with the idea of say, the Judeo Christian deity. Sure, but on the same hand, and then the same hand is, as we're going to discuss in this episode, there are a lot

of similarity. So first of all, I want to just talk a little bit about Santa Claus, this magical being the factor so heavily into Western holiday traditions as well as traditions around the world that have been influenced by the notion of the Great Jolly Old Elf. The exact mythology is going to vary, of course, but but here are just some of the often highlighted aspects of the mythos Okay, first of all, Santa is at at the very least extremely long lived, if not undying, immortal or eternal.

I mean he's been doing this thing for a long time, that's right. Secondly, uh, Santa is I guess you would say pan sofick or all knowing. He knows when you were sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good. I'm not sure he's supposed to know your inner thoughts, but he is privy to an awful lot. I think a lot of conceptions of

Santa would even give him like inner psychic access. Yeah, I mean if if Santa can, well, Santa can at least see what you're doing when other people aren't around to see what you're doing, and he sees what you're doing in private, right that that seems like that's virgin on. I mean, it's got to be like supernatural. They're oh yeah, absolutely. It's not like he's just getting reports about your behavior, right.

He definitely has supernatural abilities. It just it comes down to whether he can see inside your brain or not, if he can see your thoughts at all, if he can anticipate your actions based on that information. Also, he receives mail from all over the world often through magical means, or at least magical variations of the postal system. Uh. And you know that that includes things like letters can

find him no matter where you mail them. You can mail them at the zoo, you can mail them at home, you can mail them through the chimney, things like that. You know another thing that's very common about God's is they tend to live in inaccessible places, if not in a like extra dimensional, completely fundamentally inaccessible place, even when they live on Earth, they tend to be at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of the

ocean or something like. Yeah. I think that the mountaintop God as as an excellent example because the modern sense, what is the top of the world mountain? It is the North Pole, of course, which is which is where Santa Claus is said to reside, and it is an insanely hostile environment um fighting off polar bears, and he seems to reside there without any outside support aside from the milk and cookies that he collects every year, and

of course the big ones. Santa can travel around the entire world and visit every home in a single evening every year. I remember thinking about this as a child and thinking like, well, I don't know, that sounds really difficult, but it's probably not impossible. Right. It seemed within the stretching of plausibility to me, right, Like the magic makes sense at first, and then you start thinking about the magic and you're like, wow, this is some potent magic.

And then along the way, you know, you you introduce some science fiction concepts, and you introduce some some elaborate visions of the nature of time, and then okay, you can create some versions of it that makes a little bit more sense for hals. But at the very least, Santa has amazing abilities to travel in ways that immortal human cannot, of course, and there's there's much more than that that we might add, based not only on beliefs,

but on films as well that features Santa Claus. So he has been spotted in the presence of inhuman in human beast men, as we discussed in our Crampus episode. Okay, sometimes appears in the guise of Tim Allen and Goldberg. That's true. Uh, also whole cogd and Whole cokean play of Santa Claus. Oh I don't remember that. Definitely in the movie Santa Sleigh which is you know, you can probably guess what it's about. Also, Santa can communicate with magical deer that also fly and enable him to fly.

He can control robots, as he has the power over all toys and machines that might be argued to be toys. This of course from Santa Claus versus the Martians uh and imports in that Santa Claus is also drawn into

an interplanetary dispute. Santa associates known wizards such as Merlin. Uh. If he's watched the old Mexican Santa Claus film, we of course see him hanging out with Merlin and then dealing with demons, engaging in direct conflict with at least demons who serve the Christian Devil, if not the Christian Devil himself. Oh no, yeah, he's straight up fights demons in the movie, Oh that Devil. It's like it's like Gandal versus the Bell Rock. It's Santa versus whatever that

demon's name is. Yes, I mean he gets into some serious theological territory in that film. He also may or may not play the saxophone when visiting Asian countries, which isn't as remarkable, I guess, but it's a it's an additional wrinkle in the myth of Santa. Now, we're obviously not the first people to raise these parallels between the Santa Claus that brings magical delight to children and all over the place and uh and you know, basically gods

that are found throughout history all over the world. In fact, I would say it's almost like a cliche joke at this point to kind of uh a point out that Santa Claus and God are in some sense interchangeable to too many children. Yeah, my favorite example of this goes back to the year two thousand and one of you know,

our shared favorite shows, The Simpsons. There's the episode where Bart goes in to his bedroom and he kneels by his bed, and then he begins to pray, and he says, quote, dear Santa, if you bring me lots of good stuff, I promised not to do anything bad between now and when I wake up. Amen. It's the best kind of Simpson's joke, because there's a joke in what he says between now and when I wake up. But actually, the even funnier part is the very concept of him saying

it that he's praying to Santa in the first place. Yeah. And one of the things I always loved about it is is that it takes me a second to catch it, you know, because it's not instantly clear that it's something out of the ordinary. I think I vaguely remember almost doing this at one point as a child, even uh,

sort of at least subconsciously getting the idea confused. Uh. You know, praying to Santa is only a few degrees to the left of sending a letter to an entity that can observe your every move, And it's not that different from the idea of praying to this divine entity

that you're told about, say it's Sunday school. Yeah. And so for the rest of the episode today, we're going to be focusing on a paper that actually asks the question of, well, in the terms of cognitive science of religion, does Santa Claus actually qualify as a god or not? Does he match the other things that would be called a god within this uh, this sort of like scientific

academic framework. In particular, we're going to be looking at an article by experimental psychologist Justin Barrett published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture back in two thousand and eight and and Barrett is an interesting character here. He wrote a book titled Why Would Anyone Believe in God? And he himself is a Christian, but he also sees God as a byproduct of our mental architecture, and he sees this in a way where these two concepts have

room to coexist. Yeah, he seems like an interesting figure to me, Like, having read a bit about him, I think he's in the spirit of those who would believe that, like, the existence of God is not in conflict with naturalistic explanations for religion. Yeah. Like, for instance, when he was asked about about this potential conflict in in a two thousand seven New York Times article titled Darwin's God, Uh,

he said the following quote. Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people. Why wouldn't God then design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity? Quite natural? Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me? Should I then stop believing that she does? Which I thought was a nice

answer to that question. Yeah, that's interesting, like that you can you can put together all kinds of uh, coherent scientific explanations for what the feeling of love is, why this is an emotion that's generated by the primate b and what kind of relationship it has to you know, the evolutionary pressures that created our bodies and our brains. But at the same time, it doesn't make the love

not real. And so applying that to religion, you could say, okay, well, here's a list of reasons we think that, like evolution, natural selection could have shaped our brains to be geared toward religion. Uh, unless so you have totally mechanistic, natural type explanations for where religion comes from. And yet you could still, under this theory potentially believe your religion to

be true, or multiple religions to be true. Yeah. Absolutely, And I think that that that goes along with the way we tend to approach religious concepts on this show. I think that that we can certainly explain where they come from. They can we can discuss, uh, you know, how they evolve over time and the different influences wound up in them. But at the same time we can respect that yes, this this story, this myth, this idea, this concept can still be very weighty and very important

to the individuals that value it. Well. Yeah, and and that also though gets into another layer of complexity, which is what it actually means to quote believe in a religion, like can you believe in a religion? Does not necessarily mean that you accept, say it's story of the creation of the world as literally true, or that it suggests or that it that it's propositions about metaphysics are literally

physically real. Yeah. Absolutely, and and and just to to drive home a fact here again parental warning, Santa Claus is not real in the sense that that Santa Claus does not physically exist in the world. He's not actually doing these these uh, these great deeds that we attribute to him. But on the other hand, he is an

obviously an important cultural idea. And for my own part, like I try and drive home the importance of mythology and belief alongside the importance of you know, of a fundamental reality I guess and scientific reality when talking about these things with with my own son, Uh, you know that currently he's really invested in the idea of Santa But I am hopefully laying the groundwork that when Santa falls from the lofty realm of of presumed magical reality.

He's not going to plumb it into the hellish depths of lies and inaccuracies. He will instead fall into this realm of mythological u and this this realm of magical concepts that are valued by human culture. If that makes sense, Well, yeah, Santa Claus is not physically real, but the magic of Santa Claus is absolutely real. Like it's one of the most powerful mind states that I can recall from my entire life is the anticipation magic of the Christmas season

when I was young. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I also remember sort of going through the struggle of then realizing, Okay, Santa Claus is not objectively real, but then gradually then growing to to realize that, okay, the idea of laws can still be very important and can still be very real in that sense, in the way the same way that you know, one grows to learn that that fictional characters and uh and uh and other stories can be extremely important to us in a way that where there

is sometimes even more important than than flesh and blood individuals and in very real events in the world. But anyway, I want to get back to Barrett's work again. He's he's working in the realm of cognitive science of religion, exploring, in his words, quote why religious thoughts and actions only occupy a small area in the vast landscape of possible belief systems. And that's actually, I think a fascinating question, right, Like religious beliefs could in theory be anything. Anything could

be a religious belief. Example, my friend Julian believes that a breakfast crunch Rap Supreme that he got from Taco bell in t is the creator of the universe and only by its zesty cell ovation can he be saved from annihilation. Why is it obvious this is a joke? Seriously, Like, how come as soon as I said that, you knew that I was kidding. You don't need to go like look that up on Google and see if there really

is a sincere crunch Rap Supreme cult. You just immediately know that people don't believe that sort of thing as a sincere religion. And yet people believe in all kinds of strange things, things that would of course seem strange

to those who don't share their religious beliefs. So why is it that religious beliefs can and do involve all kinds of strange things and narratives and propositions, and yet there's actually a pretty constrained set of things even within that fantastical landscape that would truly seem acceptable as a god or a religious narrative. Like for some reason, thumbs up to the immortal, all powerful person who reads your thoughts as God, but thumbs down to the fast food

item as creator God. Right, So, like religious beliefs are not usually constrained by things like the normal functioning of physics or biology, but they are clearly constrained by something. If they weren't constrained by something, it wouldn't be obvious that the crunch rap Supreme God was a joke. Yeah, yeah,

I think it is. It is fascinating that, yes, okay, world religion involves so many wonderful concepts and so many things that when you first introduced to them, they seem strange and new and and and and and you know, perplexing at times, and and we celebrate that on on this show. And yet at the same time you know that there's not a tremendous amount of difference between you know,

the details of this religion and the next religion. Well, yeah, there is this funny tension where in one sense there's incredible diversity and difference, but on the other hand, that's all constrained within some kind of lane that we sort of have a sense. For you, you might not be able to define exactly what all the parameters are, though Barrett's going to try to do that in a minute. But you've got a sense that, like, for some reason, the crunch rap doesn't work. That's just not a thing

people would believe in as God. You just know it automatically. So what do people's actual beliefs in God's seem to have in common? Barrett argues that the cognitive science of religion has actually been pretty successful in identifying the most common features of human religious beliefs, including what kinds of concepts people most often find intuitive as God's uh, And I guess we'll get into those in just a minute, but first we should talk about some of his like

basic criteria for for what even constitutes the category. Right, So the first one, and this is a big one, is that multiple individuals must share a given idea for it to be a genuine culture or religious concept. And this is this is kind of a no brainer, but it's important to note he gives it. This example, if one person believes their lamp can grant wishes and control the weather, that's not a god. That's just one person

who has a crazy idea about their lamp. But if a bunch of people share this idea about a given lamp, it might just be a god concept. Sure uh, And I agree that religion has a very strong and possibly necessary social component, And yet I do think there are some interesting counter examples that we might want to think about,

like hermetic mystics who live in isolation. They cut themselves off from the world to develop private, personal, almost secretive relationships with and understandings of God or of the gods. And yet I think Barrett is still correct because we don't usually grant these idiosyncratic, private mystical practices the status of a religion unless they're supported by a wider structure

of belief shared by larger numbers of people. Like the mystical traditions often tend to be a kind of monastic offshoot or branch of larger religions with regular social adherents, right right, like So, yes, while we may celebrate the the ideas of say someone like a William Blake, you know, who you know, certainly had his his own sort of spin on what to on on what God was and what the you know, the cosmology of of of the universe happened to be. But we're probably not going to

buy into every detail of it. We're willing to sort of stand a foot back and say like, Okay, he has his own take on this, but I'm I'm still keeping to the canon. You know, this is the extended universe star Wars, And I'm more of a you know, the Star Wars films, right, And and we accept Blake's idiosyncratic ideas as religious because I think they grow out of a larger existing religion. You know, they're they're like, they're this kind of extended universe, the expanded universe of Christianity.

I guess one can also say that it helps in these cases of other people do not start flocking to your your extended universe concept of religion, because then you stand the risk of being a heresy and or creating a new, different religion. Right, Yeah, And that's another thought entirely. It seems to me also that only widely distribute did beliefs are likely to have stable contents. Because one member of the religion tends to mediate any potential like deviation

from the orthodoxy by another member of the religion. But private religious beliefs, they seem to be radically unstable. You know,

they're liable to change constantly. It's like asking how many editors have access to a given UH wiki page, you know, and if it's a if it's a Wikipedia page and it's one that is UH that gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of eyes on it, you know, by and large you can assume that the information there is probably going to be on the level or if it's or if anything crazy is at it, it's going to be taken out pretty quickly. You know, the the

the inquisition is going to move in on those heretics. Now, if it is an off brand wiki and it has like two editors or one editor, UH, then it's up for grabs, right, right, Yeah, maybe one day somebody gets a wild hair they're like, I'm gonna go in make some major changes. Those changes probably stick, right, nobody comes

in to change it back. I mean, there's there's no controlling influence, right, and then if it does change, you know, when it does change over time, I think the idea of a you know again, a high profile wiki, Wikipedia page, or a a widely accepted god. Like, the changes are gonna occur gradually and they're going to emerge from the culture at large. Yes, yeah, having more adherents makes an orthodoxy more generally stable, though of course they do still

change over time. It's just, uh, there's just less potential for sudden radical change, I think, right, unless certain individuals have a tremendous amount of power over it. And then in that case, you know, you have like the ancient adyption model where suddenly a ruler decides actually it's just the sun disc and that's what we're doing now exactly.

But that was one guy and it didn't stick, right, Yeah, So yeah, I think ultimately I agree with Barrett that if we're going with normal usage what people usually mean when they talk about a religious belief, it needs to be a distributed if it's held by a decent number of people. I'm not sure exactly what the number is, but like private beliefs of a single person or a handful of people, I probably don't count as religions yet.

All right. Number two, Religious concepts and god concepts can spread due to quote features of human minds that transcend cultural environmental variations unquote. And I'm assuming that's something like the fear of death and the desire to avoid pain might be such features as an example. Yeah, you're you're correct about that. I mean, what he means is just that it's obvious that influences on religion can be cultural

or social. Right, they can come from, you know, just contingent facts about history and what else is going on in the culture and politics and all that. But there can be these What he's arguing is that there are these internal factors as well. And this is what the cognitive science of religion is about. It's about brains, right. There are some religious beliefs that will be better adapted to survive in the environment of the human primate brain

than other beliefs will be, regardless of cultural factors. Like, some beliefs just fit like a puzzle piece with our instincts, emotional tendencies, cognitive capacities, and others don't fit quite so well. I was trying to think of a few simple, obvious examples. Here's a clerkey in kind of one. You probably wouldn't find a popular religious belief where you had to remember

a name for God. That was eighteen million silvers long, right, because the cognitive constraints of memory put limits on what types of God beliefs there are. You wouldn't expect a concept of God to be successful if it just couldn't

be remembered. Here's another one. Due to uh, natural features of of emotion and motivation and human brains, you wouldn't expect to find beliefs in a God that you are required to love and obey and who rewards you for your love and obedience with eternal torture in the hell of coconut crabs. You know that this just goes counter

natural instincts about motivation. Your your brain doesn't work that way. Yeah, it has to be offering you something that that that fits the mold for your your your biological life in the mind that governs your behavior in that biological life. Yeah. So yeah, so I think that that's a pretty standard

thing of cognitive science of religion. There of course going to be extremely powerful cultural factors determining what kind of religious beliefs proliferate, but there are also some probably biological neuroscientific factors that contribute as well. And speaking of biology, the third UH requirement that Barrett lays out is that some features of the human mind are products of human biology as it interacts with the natural world, apart from

cultural environmental variations. So maybe the pain example from above fits here, but there may be better examples. Oh sure, yeah, I think the pain thing works great. I mean, this is just saying like, our brains are shaped by our revolution. Of course they are, uh, and they're filled with contents from culture, but they still have some innate kind of tendencies that are just like part of your body. That's just how brains usually work. One of them is that

we're motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain. You know. It's like it's really hard to get around that standard way that brains work. Alright. So a big concept in God's of course, is that a god doesn't just need to exist within a you know, within the minds of a particular set of people. That God needs to be able to travel, It needs to be accepted by new people, uh, you know, across space and time. Yeah, needs memetics, survival advantages, it needs to be able to spread and take root

in new environments. So we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back We're going to get into uh Barrett's ideas regarding the five features that a god must have to successfully travel and this according to the cognitive science of religion, and then we'll eventually get into questions regarding Santa Claus himself. Thank alright, we're back, alright. We're discussing how this paper about whether or not Santa Claus actually counts as a god as usually defined by

the criteria of the cognitive science of religion. And this psychologist Justin barretta has in this article, he lays out five normal criteria that gods really have to have to be successful and be thought of as God's. Alright, this first one is gonna sound familiar, and that is that God's must be counterintuitive, or more specifically, they have to be minimally counterintuitive. And if this sounds familiar, it's because we did a whole episode on it totally. It originally

aired in August. It was called the Gods Must Be Counterintuitive, and we talked about myths and folk tales, including religious characters and narratives with an eye towards the question of what makes one successful and another unsuccessful in secular narratives like why does everybody know the story of Cinderella, but there is no Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage. Uh. We

talked about the Donkey Cabbages in this episode. It's a fairytale that it just doesn't seem to work as well as Cinderella because it's just crammed with count or intuitive stuff. On the other hand, you could think of tons of mundane, boring stories that don't proliferate as well as Cinderella. But in a in a religious context, or especially in ancient religious context, why does one religion spread far and wide

and another one just never take off? Again? We should acknowledge they're going to be hugely important other you know, non brain based factors influencing this, like political and social contingencies. You know, the religion of a powerful, successful empire tends to spread, right, So there's no sense ignoring those factors.

Those are obviously very important, but are their factors just in the human animal in the brain as well, And cognitive science of religion tends to think, yeah, there are probably a few factors in our brains about our brains that make some religions more successful than others. And in this episode from we discussed a line of research positing that a major factor in the success of a narrative or a religion, at least in the pre modern context,

was mnemonic resilience. That means how easily a story is remembered, how easily a story survives in the memory. Most religion, for most of history, of course, has been spread not by holy texts or anything, but by word of mouth. Right, You've got to spread a religion by telling people about it, because most people in history have been illiterate. And so what kinds of things are easier to remember when when

you're trying to spread them around the world. Well, psychologists had already found evidence that people remember lists of items better when that list contains one or two strange items that don't seem to fit with the other items on

the list. Isn't that interesting? Yeah? Yeah, Like, if you're at at a grocery store and you're you're spying on what the person in front of you is buying, you're gonna remember it if there's something that is completely out of keeping with the rest out it that that doesn't assemble in your head into a like a an easily

define herble meal. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. Like it would seem to suggest by this principle that if your looking at what somebody has in their cart, you'd remember every item they have in their cart better if it's like mostly normal groceries with a couple of really weird things in there. Like if someone were buying pie crust, whip cream, frozen strawberries, you think, oh, they make a

strawberry pie, and then you'd forget about it. But if they're buying whip cream, pie crust, um, and then something else like whole fish, whole fish exactly, you would be like, oh, my god, they're making a fish pie with whip cream on top and a Graham cracker crust. That is crazy,

and then you would be telling everyone you knew about it. So, at least as far as lists go, lists of things, it seems that it's easier to remember something that's like mostly normal with a couple of weird elements than it is to remember something that's totally bonkers or totally mundane um. And so one of the papers we looked at in this episode also applied this principle to the intuitive nous of elements in a story like a like a folk

tale or a religious narrative. This was by Norn, zion, Atran, Faulkner, and Shaler in Cognitive Science in two thousands six, called Memory and Mystery the cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives, and so basically the short story is this paper found some evidence to support the hypothesis that the kinds of

stories people remember best are minimally counterintuitive narratives. Not stories that are straightforward and mundane, not stories that are crammed with weird, outlandish stuff, but stories in the middle, sort of toward one end, like stories that are mostly straightforward with a small number of strange or fantastical counterintuitive elements. So, for instance, a humanoid elephant is a great concept, an old man who lives in the sky is a great concept.

In these concepts travel reasonably well. Yes, uh. And just as a tie into this older episode, I remember one thing we talked about in there. We talked about a number of papers that Justin Barrett was a co author of. You know, he does a lot in the cognitive science of religion, including one it I still remember. I thought it was very interesting. It was about anthropomorphization in the

psychology of religion. And this paper was published in the journal Cognitive Psychology in nine and essentially it was by Barrett and Kyle, and it found that people quote spontaneously anthropomorphize God in their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs. So like when they don't remember to avoid doing so, if you're not, they're reminding them

what they're previously stated theological beliefs are. People tend to start thinking of God as like a normal human agent with just like big supernatural powers but basically with a human brain. Yeah, Like, I can definitely relate to this because I I tend to think when I, when I, you know, think about concepts of of a monotheistic deity, I think of, uh, you know, something more surreal or psychedelic. I think of, you know, like some sort of like

triangular non physical entity. Or I think of you know, something that is uh, you know, something where the you know, the God is singular, but also all these other gods. You know. I throw a lot of concepts at it, but like like the ground of being, you know, that

kind of thing and stuff like that. But if I'm not thinking too hard about it, if I'm saying, just like listening to somebody at church talk, or I'm reflecting on some you know, just on the nature of God, I'll fall back into the sky daddy, um, where it's like an old bearded man in the sky reaching out his finger to touch the living that sort of thing. Yeah, and then I'll have to be like, oh wait, no, no, no, that's not what I've been filling my head with. Uh,

it's a you know, space triangles. Yeah. And so Barrett

and Kyle find that this tendency is very common. They say, you know, even if you think of God is like the ground of being or the force or even you know, to get into a specific religion, like in in specific monotheisms, you might find people very carefully calibrated theologians type points of view, you know, where they they actually have meticulously formed beliefs about like what God can and can't know, and what how the mind of God works and all

that kind of stuff. But like if you just kind of get them thinking without reminding them that that's what their stated beliefs are, they just sort of start thinking about God like a person with a human brain. Yeah. And this can also be like super irritating if you're you're trying to cultivate an idea of the Almighty as being say, gender neutral or even being feminine as opposed to masculine, and then when you're not thinking about it, you fall right back into to it being a you know,

traditional masculine, uh, you know, patriarchal being. Oh yeah, I mean, I guess there's that tendency to probably pushing on like specific personality attributes and stuff, and not just like the anthropomorphization, though they do say the authors here say that constantly reminding people about their own state of theological beliefs can

help attenuate the anthropomorphization impulse. Right, you know, if you you're like, hey, remember what you said, you said you believe God was like this, Like that'll that'll obviously will help some cut down on it. But they suggest here that this may indicate a strong tendency to anthropomorphize all agents, no matter what kind of being they are. Dogs become humans,

computers become humans, the world spirit becomes a human. Everything that appears to have any kind of independent action or is believed to have any kind of independent action basically just becomes a human. Well that's that's the theory of mind, right, Like it's there so we can understand primarily what our fellow humans are doing. But then it it can act, you know, it can actually be very helpful and trying to figure out what non human animals are are wanting

to do. I was reading a little bit about this in terms of veterinary science, and you know, like there's the older tradition of saying like, don't or those beyond veterinary science and science in general, just the study of animals, and say, like, there's the idea of like, you know, don't think of it as as a person, don't anti anthropomorphize it at all, don't you know, don't think about

its feelings. And then there's someone say, well, actually, you know, we should, we should use theory of mind to do a say a certain degree to a safe degree, uh, to figure out what is going on in the minds

of of of an animal. But then if you're anthropomorre vising everything, if you are, in the words of creative writing a teacher I once had, if you anthropomorphize like a mad god, then that's where we get into problems or and also that's where we end up creating some of the more uh, you know, inspired concepts in human culture as well. Yeah, totally uh, I guess, so to

bring it back. Yes, as Barrett says, according to the cognitive science of religion, it seems true that God's must be in some way counterintuitive, ideally minimally counterintuitive, you know, having some unusual aspects like maybe say, being invisible and all powerful, but then I have to be all powerful.

There are also minor gods that still qualify as God's right, invisible and having some kind of non normal powers or attributes, right, I mean, basically I like to play the game of like, just keep adding counterintuitive aspects to a particular deity and decide at which point it's silly and no longer intimidating, like a like a a strange tall man comes out of the shadows and gives me commandments. So that's great, all right, Let's add that he has the head of

a dog. Okay, even better. Hybrids are a huge part of religious concepts. Now he's got crab claws. Then he has crab claws, right, and then okay, it's one's a crab claw and one is a hand puppet. Uh. And so for like, every time you add something else to it becomes a little bit more ridiculous and a little harder to to take um and that that seems to be part of the whole. Minimally counterintuitive. Yes, but they've got to at least be counterintuitive, because if you say, like,

this is my buddy Jeff, he's god. He doesn't have anything unusual about him, like there are no he doesn't have any powers. He's not invisible, he can't fly, he's not omniscient, omnipotent, nothing like that. He's just Jeff. That's not that nobody thinks that's a god. Now, Jeff would probably at least pass the next one. This is number two on Barrett's list. God's must be intentional agents. Barrett uses the example of two minimally counterintuitive concepts, an invisible

potato versus a talking potato. Okay, both minimally counter intuitive, but one works better as a god than another. Yeah, only the latter is viable candidate for godhood because it implies agency. A god must have agency and work as an intentional agent. Now, this concept does make me think about ideas of say, slumbering gods, dead gods, and mindless gods, at least in fiction such as you know, Lovecrafts as is off comes to mind. Oh you you got me on as a off recently, but I looked it up.

It's as a thought, as a thought, sorry to correct that that would make yeah, it would have the Egyptian thought aspect to it. Yeah, yeah, well as as a thought or as his off. He doesn't care because he has he's mindless. He doesn't even know his own name. He's just swirling chaos in the middle of the universe, nawing on himself while uh, you know, blind monsters play flutes. But like this would be an example of First of all,

it's a god that nobody actually worships. It is a fictional deity, but is at least it is at least the concept of a deity that is mindless. Yes, now, I think this is another reason that, like the crunch Rap, Supreme Aim could not be a viable god, because it's essentially as a thought of them the mindless of being

at the center of the chaotic universe. Exactly. It's an inanimate object that symbolizes primordial chaos, can't talk, has no intentions, isn't going to do much right, all right, we're gonna jump in here and take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank And we're back. All right, So let's move on to the third requirement. God's must possess strategic information. So, in other words, the gods or God must have some ideas, some advice, or some secret knowledge

that can improve your life here on earth. Perhaps it's a set of laws, a revelation that there are no laws, or knowledge about the coming end times. Or the God must have privilege knowledge he knows what you've done, or the nature of your inner thoughts, or what will happen to you in the future. Yes, now, I think it's very important to note that this does not mean the same thing as like omniscient, which would be an omniscience all knowing. No, would be a form of strategic information,

to be like the ultimate form of strategic information. But the omniscience is a property only some God's possess. Right. The strategic information idea here just requires that a god knows something valuable or relevant. For example, the version of God depicted in the Garden of Eden's story does not appear to be all knowing. Like he walks in the garden,

he has limited perspective. It is possible to at least temporarily hide from him, and yet he clearly has access to important information that Adam and Eve do not have, right though, I also always wondered if he was just kind of like a you know, sky daddy, playing dumb, but sort of trying to see what his creations are gonna say. You know, like when you walk in and you're like, all right, who smeared their food on this window?

You know who smeared the food on the window. But you're you're asking the question because you want to have a civilized discussion about it, and and and and you know, and in doing so, uh, you know, prevent more or food sparriage from happening. Sure, well, I think that's a valid interpretation too. I think the other one is more straightforward, but it could be the one. Um uh So. Barrett points out that it's important that this information is relevant

to humans in particular. Right quote, Suppose a certain minimally counterintuitive agent only knows about Himalayan micro invertebrates, such a being is unlikely to gain traction as a noteworthy entity and rise to the status of God. You know. And that's specifically because this entity does not have any information that is useful in any way relevant to humans like they and and they don't have to be helpful, right,

God's can be mean, Gods can be bad. Beings with strategic information could be helpful allies or dangerous enemies, as say some of the Greek gods often are like Poseidon. You know he wants to wreck your ship and get revenge on you. He's still God, al right, Next we have number four. This is a big one. God's must be able to act in the human world in detectable ways. Barrett says, quote an all saying all knowing statue that

does nothing but season knows is not worth transmitting. Gods have to do stuff and be known by that stuff, or at least to have done something. Otherwise, it's just not a concept that's going to travel sure or to be likely to potentially do something in the future. Yeah, a god that has no interaction whatsoever with the world usually isn't going to form a religion. People aren't have beliefs about that core like, for instance, think about UFO religions, right.

They tend to involve ideas of say, well, okay, the the aliens came in an ancient time, or the Aliens are speaking to us now, or the aliens will come and save our our you know, dying culture. But if your your UFO religion says the aliens are out there, they've never come. Uh, they've never communicated with us and they never will come, but we worship them as a god. That doesn't make any sense. Why am I? What am

I getting out of this relationship? Yeah? Now again, this is one where I would say that none of these rules are things where you can of no possible exceptions, because, like I can think about I guess, like in the Gnostic religions, there are some types of God that are like very very removed. You could still say that their actions have some like downstream effects or like very important

downstream effects on the world. But there are like some types of gods or godlike type concepts that are at least a very distant remove from the goings on of the world. But often in those cases they're like sort of layers below them who do interact more directly. Right, Or in some cases, they're more esoteric variations of a god that is worshiped more popularly in a slightly different form Alright, let's move on to five. Gods must be

capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. Yes, behaviors such as ritual and prayer, and they need to be reinforcing behaviors. For for instance, Barrett makes the example that the ritual can't promise to produce eight foot children because there will

be no eight foot children around them to reinforce this. Um. Now, rituals that promise happiness, um contentment, even financial gain, these at least you can make and argue that, Look, here's the proof of the ritual working, right, Yeah, I mean, and it doesn't have to be clear proof. I mean, as long as there could be some kind of ambiguous way of interpreting that the rituals are having an effect. Uh,

then I think that's still okay. But yeah, he's saying that, like the ritual can't guarantee results that it won't actually deliver. Right if you say, if you tithe at to my new religion, you will live forever, Like that's that's gonna bite you in the butt eventually, and then your religion

is gonna fall apart. But it is funny how far out on the limb you can kind of get with this, Like as long as there's some kind of ambiguity where you're not really sure or maybe you don't see it not working for other people or something like there, you know, they're the prosperity gospel is incredibly pop piller, But I think that there's enough ambiguity that you don't necessarily know

what's going on with everybody else who's trying it. There's enough wiggle room to say, like, you're not quite doing it right. Right. It inspires a certain level of dishonesty among the people that are practicing it. And then at the center of it, you generally have an individual that's perpetrating a con job like it is about the appearance

of wealth. And then of course they're they're you know, in most of these cases, they are they're they're leaching money right there, they are financially benefiting from the scenario. And then you it's not like you have to carry this out forever. You know, it's a con games have a beginning in an end usually right. Yeah, But then of course there are again, even if you're only understanding religion in a totally naturalistic way, there are all kinds

of benefits that religious rituals can deliver. They can deliver like maybe you know, strong tightly bonded communities with people who help each other they can deliver a sense of happiness and contentment. All all kinds of like psychological and social benefits could be perfectly naturalistic outcomes of religious beliefs

and practices. Right So even if you know, say, you know, Prosperity Gospel Church, which is is you know, vilified to a large extent and for in many cases for a good reason, you could still have that kind of a church community that would have a lot of benefits to

the members of that community. Likewise, you could have, uh, you know, something positive and beneficial sort of emerge out of a more restrictive totalitarian belief system, Like maybe there's some concept within that religion that resonates and works and then the the individuals practicing it run off and you know, start something new with that that concept that actually works

for them. Arguably an example of this I've I've heard is, you know, in Scientology there are members of Scientology or former members of Scientology who have claimed that, you know, they don't care for the organization or some of the culture there, perhaps, but they like the rich wells, they like some of the the technological um ideas, and some of the practices that are utilized. They see value in them, and they attempt to spend them off into something separate

from them. The central Church of scientology. Oh yeah, I mean ESPEC. The lower levels of scientology are are almost in some ways indistinguishable from like a self help program that's basically designed to like give you confidence and motivation to take steps to achieve your goals and that kind

of thing. And you know, with stuff like that, you can certainly see how just having a program that's supportive and telling you to move confidently towards the things you want could be perceived as very helpful, could actually be very helpful in producing motivation for that kind of behavior, even if it also implies things about you know, like bombs from space and aliens in you and ghosts and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, as long

as all that stuff is minimally counterintuitive. I mean, because that's the thing does seem maximally counterintuitive. But I don't know, I don't know. I sometimes, at least I I see people criticize. You see this the thing with with any religion, someone is liable in one religion, they're liable to criticize the other by saying that's crazy, that's wonky. How can you believe in that and uh, without actually looking at the details of their own belief system, and um, yeah,

I mean that's just that's just part of it. But yeah, it's what you've come to accept as normal. And this is the thing actually about that's come up in in the theory about being counterintuitive, you know, religions needing counterintuitive elements. Is that, uh like, as you get used to a religion, the elements that used to be counterintuitive become less counter they're becoming and then you need the next spin on it, right, you need the mash up. Yeah, all right, everybody, we're

gonna have to go ahead and break right here. This one went long. Yeah, this one went a bit a little bit long, So we're gonna have to bust into two episodes. Uh, certainly there's gonna be more Santa in the second half than in the first half. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that'll send you where you need to go. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Just make

sure you rate, review, and subscribe. That really helps us out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio is at the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.