What a friend they have in Jesus

A fascinating study reported in the New Scientist suggests that when religious believers pray they believe that they're actually talking to someone. A Danish professor, Uffe Schjødt, used MRI to scan the brains of twenty Christians. In one task, they were asked to improvise a prayer. This "triggered patterns that match those seen when people communicate with each other, and activated circuitry that is linked with the theory of mind - an awareness that other individuals have their own independent motivations and intentions... Also activated were part of the prefrontal cortex linked to the consideration of another person's intentions, and an area thought to help access memories of previous encounters with that person."

In another test, they were invited to "pray" to Santa Claus. Here, the result was very different, with no activation of the prefrontal cortex. This, suggests Schjødt, is because people realise that the Yuletide gift-deliverer doesn't really exist.

Naturally, such experiments reveal nothing about whether or not God actually exists. It does, however, say a great deal about how people feel about him. Not surprisingly, the God to whom people pray is a person - basically, an invisible friend. Sophisticated believers, the sort who write articles in the Guardian criticising the "simplistic" notion of God held up by atheists as a straw man, want us to think that when discussing God or arguing about his existence anthropomorphic language is unhelpful, even misleading. They warn against the clichéd view of God as an old man with a long beard sitting on a cloud somewhere.

The high priestess of this sort of tosh is, of course, Karen Armstrong. Here's a typical passage from her bestseller, A History of God:

Those atheists who preached emancipation fro a God who demands such servile obedience were protesting against an inadequate but unfortunately familiar image of God. Again, this was based on a conception of the divine that was too personalittic. It interpreteted the scriptural image of God's judgement too literally and assumed that God was a sort of Big Brother in the sky... the anthropomorphic idea of God as Lawgiver and ruler is not adequate to the temper of postmodernity.

Similarly Mark Vernon, writing today on CIF in defence of "principled agnosticism", comments that

religious language appears to reflect something fundamental about the human condition, namely that we need what Keats called a "negative capability" – the capacity to live happily with the manifold uncertainties that surround us. God-talk, when divinity is recognized as being unknown and beyond our reach, can be a powerful expression of that.

But the Danish study shows that as "an old man with a long beard" is precisely how the vast majority of believers do conceive of God, at least when they are praying. Asked to articulate their theological opinions, most would doubtless deny such a reductionist view. God is a spirit, they would say. And, indeed, it is a manifest absurdity to picture the creator and sustainer of the vast universe as basically a superior type of human being.

Religious language remains soaked in such thinking. The most extreme anthropomorphism is to be found in the early books of the Old Testament, where God strolls around the Garden of Eden and turns up to lunch with Abraham. But even in later books, where a more elevated concept of God is supposedly to the fore, the writers describe a human-like being who loves and hates both nations and particular individuals, who is prone to anger and open to persuasion. He is a king, a lord, a judge, a father; he has a throne, a right hand, feet, an army. Of course, all this is "metaphorical", but it is also somehow more than metaphorical: it seems to be the only way in which most people can conceptualise the divine at all. With Christianity came a whole new level of anthropomorphism: a God who not only had human-like characteristics, but even a human face, one who put in personal appearances, as did his mother, to favoured men and women.

It's often claimed that Islam has a much less anthropomorphic view of God. But Allah, too, is a being who thinks and speaks (in Arabic, apparently) and who has strongly-expressed opinions, even about such trivial matters as the behaviour of Mohammed's wives. Hinduism offers its worshippers a vast array of gods to choose from, all with strikingly individual characteristics: the monkey-god Hanuman, the alluringly feminine Parvati, the warrior-king Ram. It is to these, rather than to the impersonal Brahma described by theologians and philosophers, that most ordinary people relate. Buddhism, for the most part, manages to dispense with anthropomorphism - but only by getting rid of "God" entirely.

What Schjødt's brain imaging reveals, then, is something that we really know all along: that when it comes to worshipping, or praying to, or putting trust in, "God" most people (even, I suspect, some of the sophisticated theologians) are not relating to the Supreme Being, or to the Ground of Universal Transcendence, or some such abstraction or spiritual essence, but to something much closer to the human scale. Perhaps language, with its talk of heavenly fathers and "the word of God", pushes them in that direction. But I suspect that religion, as a way of making sense of the world, had its orgins in anthropomorphic ways of thought that seem to come quite naturally to human beings. Evolved to relate to other individuals with minds, people tend to relate to inanimate objects and even the universe itself as beings possessed of intelligence. In the days before science, people conceptualised forces at work in the natural world as reflecting the activities of beings with intentions, or as beings themselves. Even today we tend to (half-jokingly, perhaps, and in full knowledge of its futility) feel anger towards a car that won't start. And we are constantly exhorted to feel a sense of responsibility towards "Gaia".

A few years ago there was a much-mocked fad called "cosmic ordering", whose devotees were encouraged to "place an order" with the cosmos, as with an online shop, in the expectation that the cosmos would deliver. The absurdity lay in the unambiguous way it revealed the mechanics of most prayer and most religion. Instead of the mediating entity "God", which elides the radical disjunction between the human-scale and the universal, it forced people to imagine the universe itself as taking a personal interest in their wellbeing. And despite a brief popularity, that was for most people a step too far. It is difficult, though not impossible, to pretend that the vastness of space-time can be your friend. Yet that, surely, is what most religious people do every day.