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Chapter 12” How Does God Become Real
How does God become real to people when God is understood to be
” The lead author is Tanya Luhrmann, Ph.D., a professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her interests include the social shaping of psychological experience, and the way that social practice may affect even the most concrete ways in which people experience their world, particularly in the domain of what some would call the “irrational”. Her first project was a detailed study of the way apparently reasonable people come to believe apparently unreasonable beliefs (“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft’, Harvard, 1989). Her second project explored the apparently irrational self-criticism of a postcolonial India elite, the result of colonial identification with the colonizers (“The Good Parsi’, Harvard 1996). Her third book identified two cultures within the American profession of psychiatry and examined the way these different cultures encouraged two different forms of empathy and two different understandings of mental illness (“Of Two Minds”, Knopf, 2000). She trained at the University of Cambridge (PhD 1986), and taught for many years at the University of California San Diego. Prior to moving to Stanford she was the Max Palevsky Professor and a director of the Clinical Ethnography project in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.
Religion is often understood as a matter of belief: a yes/no proposition. This essay suggests that it may be more helpful, and more accurate, to understand religious commitment as a response to sensory experience that can be learned, and that the capacity to learn depends upon one’s knowledge and belief, one’s proclivity for experiencing the world in particular ways, and the impact of devotional practice.
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invisible and immaterial, as God is within the Christian tradition? This is not the question of whether God is real, but rather how people learn to make the judgment that God is present. Such a God is not accessible to the senses. When you talk to that God, you can neither see his face nor hear his voice. You cannot touch him. How can you be confident that he is there?
Anthropology cannot answer the question of whether God is real. But the traditional method of the discipline, participant observation, can use the slow, careful method of fieldwork to explore the way that people learn to experience God as present in their lives. And what the method can teach us is that this often intensely private and personal relationship between a creature and its creator is built through a profoundly social process.
In fact, one of anthropology’s most useful contributions to understanding the experience of God is to draw attention to just how much work faith takes, and to the fact that different kinds of faith—and different understandings of God—demand different kinds of work. Many who do not believe in God approach the question of religious belief as the problem of why people should believe in the existence of an invisible, intentional agent in their world. One of the more persuasive recent answers emerges from the observation that many of our cognitive traits evolved to help us survive. Evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists argue that belief in invisible beings is an accidental byproduct of the way our minds have evolved over the millennia. Our quick, effortless, automatic intuitions lead us to “anthropomorphize,” or to see faces in the clouds, as one scholar puts it. From
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