God and the Imagination

[Angrboda]

I like to think of it more as an artifact of the way that human minds work than any kind of recognizable act of imagination. Folk psychological concepts tend to divide the mind up into clear, separate, and inviolate categories: belief, imagination, memory, consciousness, unconsciousness, and so on. The fact of the matter is that our minds are more like a toolbox of assorted tools that combine to perform different cognitive tasks, and the more recognizable ones, like "imagination" are akin to constellations of stars in the sky — we recognize it for what it is based on the specific arrangement of its constituent stars, and its particular location and orientation in the sky. However, many of these components or stars can combine into constellations for which we have no standard classification, or recognition that it is just stars arrayed in the night sky; religious intiutions are one such pattern: they are made of the same stuff as constellations like imagination or reasoning or pattern matching, but because we don't recognize them in that particular arrangement, we don't recognize them as being of the same "mind stuff" as these other cognitive forms. So I would say that I suspect that, from inside, at best, its not clear that "god stuff" is built out of the same stuff as imagination and theory of mind, and can very easily appear to a person as something unrelated. And a simple stroll through the rather lengthy list of cognitive biases that we know about from psychology shows that the mind introspecting upon itself is not a particularly reliable, or, many times, even aware, tool for deconstructing its own experience.