Bridging Science, Religion,
and Cognition

Does it matter who you picture?

Psychologists have a name for the figure you actually see when you pray — not the doctrine you would recite if asked, but the face your mind supplies when your attention lapses. They call it the God-image, and thirty years of work says it is not a harmless detail.

What that work has measured is whether the figure is benevolent or punitive, and whether it is close or remote. What it has almost never measured is whether the figure is a mother or a father.

Nobody knows. Not because the answer is hidden — because the study has never been run.

The text cannot answer this one.

I can prove the historical half from documents. The manuscripts are on the page; the men who changed the grammar have names and dates; the verses they altered can be set side by side. That is textual work and it settles what it settles.

But the claim I am actually interested in is not a claim about manuscripts. It is a claim about people — about what happens to someone raised with one figure rather than another. A claim about outcomes in human beings is not the kind of thing a text can settle, however old the text is and however carefully you read it.

That is the honest reason the science is here. Not as decoration, and not to borrow authority from a lab coat. It is here because I asked a question my own discipline cannot answer, and the only way to answer it is to go and measure.

The ground that has been covered.

This is not an empty field. A great deal has been established, and I did not establish any of it — these are other people’s findings, and I name them because you should be able to go and read them without me.

Seventy-three instruments, and not one asks.

Here is where the field stops, and it is a sharper edge than I expected to find.

Sharp et al. (2021) reviewed seventy-three separate measures of God-representation — three decades of instrument design. Not one of them assesses gender. The question has not been answered because it has not been asked.

And the data to ask it already exist, in public, for free. The General Social Survey carried a variable called MAPA: where would you place your image of God, between Mother and Father? Seven-point scale. Asked across 1985–1998 and again in 2008. Thousands of respondents, alongside the wellbeing measures, sitting in an open archive.

It has been used once — by Shah, Bartkowski & Xu (2016), and they used it to study attitudes about gender roles. Nobody has ever run it against wellbeing outcomes.

Three legs, because one would not hold.

A question that crosses this much ground cannot be worked from a single discipline, so the degree concentration was built to triangulate:

• Substrate — biology. What the organism actually is, before anything is believed about it.
• Development — how a mind forms, and when the figures that populate it get installed.
• Architecture — cognitive psychology. How the machinery handles an abstraction, and what it does when the abstraction will not stay abstract.

Religion is not a fourth leg. It is the thing being examined, and the texts are the historical record of how the figure was described before anyone thought to measure its effects.

The empirical work is the GSS route above — an existing variable, public data, a question that was never put to it. It is tractable, it is checkable by anyone who downloads the same file, and it does not require me to be believed about anything.

The bee does not think about the flowers.

A bee does not set out in the morning intending to pollinate anything. It goes for what it needs. The pollination happens anyway — not as a by-product it is tracking, but as the ordinary consequence of an organism doing the thing it was built to do inside the system it belongs to.

That is the shape of every outcome worth having. You act in accordance with the design, and the benefit does not stop at you. It runs outward, into the household, the community, the generation after, the ground itself — and a good deal of it you will never see.

The inverse is the same mechanism run backwards, and it is not a punishment. The bees that leave the hive die, and so do the flowers. An action whose effects terminate with the person who took it has produced nothing and cost something. An action whose effects cycle back into the system has made the system more capable of continuing.

This is why the question is not a private one. If the figure a person carries shapes how they fare — and the evidence above says it does — then it shapes how they treat the people around them, what they build, what they leave, and how they hold the ground they were given. A civilization’s idea of who is on the other end is not a private matter. It is an environmental one.

Science is how you find out. Not because it is the only way of knowing, but because it is the only one that will tell you that you were wrong.

The edges of this, stated plainly.

The historical half I can prove from documents. The psychological half is other people’s established work, cited above. The join between them — that losing the mother from the language is part of why the house feels the way it does — is an argument, not a finding. No study has tested it. That is precisely why I am proposing to run one.

• I will not say the research shows people need a maternal divine figure. It has not been tested. Every replicated finding concerns benevolent vs. punitive and close vs. remote — not gender.
• I will not say humans cannot attach to an abstraction. They demonstrably can. What the evidence shows is that the mind converts the abstraction back into a person.
• I will not say removing the mother caused a mental health crisis. That is the question being asked, not an answer being reported.
• When I cross from what is demonstrated to what I am arguing, I will say so at the crossing — every time, and not in a footnote.