Every once in a while, when someone notices a similarity between one of my sons and me, they will say, “You look like Joel,” or “You act like Aaron,” or “You think like Blair.”  While I appreciate the complements, I think, and sometimes say, “You’ve got it backwards.  My sons actually resemble me and not the other way around.”

It is understandable that we compare the familiar to the new without analyzing whether that which is new to us is actually the “parent” of that which is familiar.  We compare what we know to what we are trying to get to know.

From the moment we are born we interact with people.  Most of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out what people are like.  So when we are introduced to God we can’t help but imagine that God is like a person, only bigger and better and older.   Given this familiarity, it is not surprising that we get the likeness between God and humans backwards.  When we hear, “God created humans in God’s image,” we begin to create a mental image of a God who resembles us.

There is one way this backwards thinking most readily leads us astray.  There is one set of human attributes that we easily attribute to God, generally without questioning or thinking much.  We ask ourselves what are our highest qualities as humans?  What is it about us that sets us apart from the rest of the animals?  What makes homo sapiens the culmination of the process of evolution?

It’s our brain’s enormous pre-frontal cortex, with its ability to imagine the future and to form intentions and designs.  We are so used to using this human ability, and so proud of it, that we find it hard to think or talk about things without imputing this ability to other beings, sometimes even to inanimate objects.

I heard an extreme example of this thinking when a climatologist imputed intention to a glacier.  More to the point of this post was an example of a Christian in Appalachia who explained that if God didn’t want people to strip mine coal (and in the process destroy a beautiful creek) he wouldn’t have placed the coal so near the surface.

This blog questions the way we impute the functions of the human pre-frontal cortex to God.   This includes:

• Imagining that God imagines the future in the way that we normally do

• Making the conceptual leap from God as Creator to God as Architect who has a finished project in mind before he begins creating

• Assuming that the measure of God’s power is his ability to control the outcomes of his plans

If we can discover a touch of humility about our highest human cognitive abilities—and so entertain the possibility that God might not think quite like we do—then we can begin to create a new opening.  This opening can allow light into our thinking and discussions about questions like the problem of evil.  More importantly, this opening can provide a way to begin to reconnect such things as our beliefs with our actions, or our public personas with our inner souls, or even our science with our religion.