Google is the new Mickey Mouse (and Cognitive Science of Religion still isn’t clear about what a god is)

Abstract

In a 2008 paper, Justin Barrett outlined five conditions meant to be jointly sufficient for an agent-concept to elicit faith and religious commitment. In other words, he outlined five requirements for an entity to be a god. His table of criteria was intended as a solution to the so-called Mickey Mouse problem, the problem of explaining why people believe in god(s), but not in other entities, such as Mickey Mouse. Barrett was criticized in a 2010 paper by Gervais & Henrich, who claimed the table yields false positives: some god-concepts meet all five criteria but are not the object of faith and religious commitment, such as Zeus, as well as any god-concepts of every extinct religion. In this paper, I argue along similar lines, but beyond. I show that some of the false positives Barrett’s table allows for don’t even stand for gods of any genuine religion, extinct or not.

Keywords

• religious beliefs, cognitive science of religion, MCI hypothesis, Mickey Mouse problem, god concepts.