我小时候经常去基督教归正会(Christian Reformed Church)，每个周日我们都会背诵使徒信经。信的开头是:“我信上帝，全能的父，天地的创造者。”这里有两点需要注意。首先，信经提到了“信仰”的心理状态。Second, the belief is supposed to be in a being that is almighty, oromnipotent.

I wrote last time on whether cognitive science of religion impacts whether oneshouldbelieve in God. Today I’d like to discuss a finding that raises a different but related question.

What is thepsychological natureof religious “belief”—orcredence我是这么叫的?

In 1996, the young psychologist Justin Barrett, together with Frank Keil,published the following discovery. If you give a story about God to members of a religion that professes the “omni” properties (God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent), they do not process the story in a way that takes those properties into account. Rather, people process the story as though God has certain limitations, contrary to the “beliefs” they profess. Furthermore, their subjects included members of several religions: Buddhism, Bahaism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism.

More generally, people seem to reason about God as if God were anagent一个像其他生物一样，以信仰、利益和局限为基础的生物。

Let’s look at their experiment more closely. Barrett and Keil gave their subjects vignettes that describe God helping two different parties in different locations. Critically, the stories in the vignettes wereneutralas to whether God helped the two partiessimultaneouslyorsequentially(onethen另一个)。

之后，他们要求受试者回忆并叙述这些故事。

An omnipotent and omnipresent God should be able to help people in different places simultaneously. So you might think subjects recalled the story in a way that portrayed God helping the different parties in different placesat the same time. Or perhaps they should simply replicate the neutrality of the original story.

但事实并非如此。

By a very significant margin, subjects recollected the story as if God helped the partiesone at a time. Their recall seemed guided by the same intuitive assumption you would make about any other agent: agents can only be in one place at a time.

这是关键的结论。The way subjects implicitly reason about God iscontraryto their professed “beliefs.”

So we can return to our original question, reformulated in light of this experiment. What is the nature of the “belief” that people are reporting when they say “I believe in God, the Father almighty”? You would think that if someonebelieved他或她会根据这个命题进行推理和回忆。但这正是巴雷特和凯尔所展示的，宗教信徒在他们所谓的信仰中并没有这么做。

一种对比立刻浮现出来。Many people havepolitically correct他们公开表达自己的信念和态度，尽管他们倾向于不这么想，不这么想，不这么做。例如，一名学校老师可能会说，她认为来自一个种族的学生并不比来自另一个种族的学生更容易做坏事，但一旦储物柜里的东西不见了，她就会比白人学生更容易怀疑有色人种学生。此外，这些怀疑引导了她的行动，导致她对有色人种学生的质疑更加激烈和更大的怀疑。

The politically correct school teacher has two levels of representation in her mind that pertain to race and behavior. At the politically correct level, the level that controls what shesays, she represents all the races as being the same with respect to their likelihood of committing mischief. But at an underlying, intuitive level she represents people of color as more prone to breaking the rules than whites. (I think the existence such discrepancies is common knowledge by now, as it yields the well-know phenomenon ofimplicit bias.)

The Barrett and Keil experiment shows, surprisingly, that there is a similar two-level structure in the minds of religious “believers”—at least for religions that profess the “omni” properties. At the theologically correct level, they represent God as omnipresent. At an underlying intuitive level, they represent God as limited to one place at a time, like any other agent. (For the record, I’m drawing the parallel between political correctness and theological correctness purely for the sake of illuminating the cognitive structures in question. I amnot这一比较暗示宗教人士容易产生偏见。)

It would be tempting to conclude that the level of theologically correct credence is mere pretense. The “believers” in God’s omnipresence are merely pretending to believe. On thiscynical model, the theologically correct “belief” is a mere fictional imagining, expressed as part of a pretense.

But I think that the cynical model goes too far. There was a sincerity that accompanied the profession of the Apostle’s Creed, as far as I could tell. People werenotwillfully being dishonest about what they believed. And the cynical model is wrong insofar as it predicts this sincerity should not exist. (We can say something similar about our school teacher. She may be quite in earnest when she professes her egalitarian “beliefs.”)

On the other hand, the usualsimple modelof religious belief, which holds that religious believers straightforwardly believe what they profess like you or I believe grass is green, can’t be right either. That’s what Barrett and Keil show.

Thus, neither the cynical model nor the simple model correctly describes the psychology of theological correctness. But if both of the obvious-seeming models are wrong, that just leaves us with a compelling question, which is a special case of our broader psychological question.

确切地说，神学上正确的信仰的本质是什么?

I’ll attempt an answer in my next piece.