UC Santa Barbara

The human mind is equipped with a variety of evolved mechanisms, each specialized for representing concepts from an adaptively important domain, such as persons and their mental states, animals and their biology, plants, and physical objects and their mechanical properties. But how does the mind build concepts that were not targets of natural selection, that is, concepts that go beyond or even conflict with the inferences engineered into these evolved mechanisms? Are evolutionarily new concepts built out of nothing (as domain-general learning theories predict), or are they built by initially co-opting evolved concepts? And if evolutionary new concepts initially co-opt evolved ones, do they later revise the evolved concepts, or do they co-exist alongside them? I evaluate these questions using the Christian God concept as a case study.

I demonstrate using a novel sentence verification paradigm that, first, the God concept is built by co-opting the evolved person concept, and, second, that in the minds of Christian religious adherents, acquired theological representations of God which conflict with person representations (e.g. infallibility) co-exist alongside and do not revise them. In the experiments reported here, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate statements for which core knowledge intuitions about persons and acquired Christian theology about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., “God has beliefs that are true”] or false according to both [e.g., “All beliefs God has are false”]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., “God has beliefs that are false”] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., “All beliefs God has are true”]). Exp. 1 demonstrated that participants were less accurate and slower responding to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core knowledge intuitions both co-existed alongside and interfered with the acquired theological representations. Exp. 2 tested the effects of cognitive load on response interference. Exp. 3 ruled out a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings, by demonstrating that response interference is found for God but not for an ordinary entity (a priest). Exp. 4 demonstrated that response interference is invariant with age and with theological experience. Indeed, response interference was found even in Christian religious adherents with a lifetime of theological experience. Finally, Exp. 5-6 expanded on the findings of the previous experiments, which primarily focused on God’s psychology, to God’s physicality. I discuss the implications of these findings to domain-general versus domain-specific theories of learning.