How Can God Feel So Real?
How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people \u2014 as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn\u2019t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion Tanya M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real. Does this effort help explain the enduring power of faith?
Shermer and Luhrmann discuss: the anthropology of religion \u2022\xa0what it means when people say they \u201chear the voice of God\u201d or are \u201cwalking with God\u201d \u2022 normal \u201cvoices within\u201d vs. hallucinations and psychoses \u2022 mystical experiences \u2022 anomalous psychological experiences \u2022 sleep paralysis and other cognitive anomalies \u2022 belief in angels and demons \u2022 absorption and religious beliefs \u2022 prayer vs. meditation vs. mindfulness \u2022 sensed presences \u2022 why people believe in God \u2022 empirical truths, religious truths, mythic truths \u2022 how people come to religious belief vs. how they leave religion \u2022 theodicy \u2022 magic and superstition \u2022 witches and witchcraft \u2022 shamans and shamanism.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology. Her books include When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. She has written for the New York Times, and her work has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines. She lives in Stanford, California.