8 Divine agency is very often seen in terms of the most complex object that man knows of, and that is
himself. The cognitive system of humans automatically infers many operations to avoid an overload on
itself, and it recruits information from all its resources. “[A] lot happens beneath that Cartesian stage, in a
mental basement that we can describe only with the tools of cognitive sciences” (Boyer, 2001: 18). People
know a lot about themselves, much more than other things in the world, and human beings become the
easiest source for information to produce inferences. God was created in man’s image, and it is an
anthropological universal that supernatural beings are considered to have a mind (Boyer, 2001: 143-144)
and this places man much closer to the Divine than to the animal on the Great Chain of Beings.
A human-like God is nonetheless, in Justin Barrett’s words, “theologically correct” (1999). Devotees of
Eastern or Western religious systems would say that God has a lot of human-like qualities. For Christians
God became human by taking the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, or for Hindus by becoming an avatar like
Krishna. Yet one must agree that these “humanized gods” are not quite like other humans (in fact one of
the ways the God is often described is through the via negativa, or the path of negation). The God
presented in the Bible or the Qur’an has a mighty hand, and His eyes see everything, but these are
metaphors of His omnipotence and His omniscience. In a way the devotee must juggle with two different
mental spaces (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002): one is a human-God, to which she can relate; the other, which
builds on the first, is a supernatural-God, far more different from what she can ever imagine. Muslims are
warned that God is beyond anything one might devise by the way of concept or definition, and this could
be considered true also by other religious systems. Although God has revealed Himself in and through the
Holy Word in human language, the devotee constantly shifts between knowing and not being able to
know. Devotees can understand God, despite His infinite qualities, only in terms of humanity and
considering Him as one of us, albeit the Ultimate Perfection of Humanity.
Since the case studies I present here are of Christians, I’m going to focus my attention on Christian and
Biblical language, which nonetheless is analogous in many regards to the language used by other theistic
religious systems. People choose to represent God based on tradition, but also on the individuals’
knowledge and experience of themselves and their world. A group of people, like the Eskimos, who had
never seen sheep in their everyday arctic world could never have understood the metaphor God is a
Shepherd, which is why the first missionaries translating the Bible substituted it with God is a Reindeer
Herder, and what gets sacrificed is not the Lamb of God, but the Seal of God.
Let’s now turn to some of the ways in which 21st century devotee talks about their personal spiritual
experiences.