God Does Not Guide

People think that it is God speaking to them when they get an insight.

In other cases they may hear internal self talk, and wonder where it comes from, or if it is God.

I think that the experience they are having is a result of an adaptive unconscious process that is ingrained in all of us.

This “adaptive” process is continuously gathering information from numerous sensory and physiological inputs, and is mostly unconscious.

As a result of this process there eventually surfaces to our conscious experience the experience of a gut feeling – or intuition. In some cases this experience may be a flash of inspiration, or an experience of “knowing”. There is often some positive emotion associated, and a feeling of affirmation or decision.

I often read or hear stories from believers about how “God told me this”, or “God guided me in that”.

They have intuitions, or hear a kind of voice, and as a response of their upbringing they may conclude that the voice is “God”, or an “angel” or something similar.

In these cases I think that people are mistakenly attributing their conscious experiences to an earlier explanation they were taught in order to make sense of their experiences, rather than attributing them to the real, but unconscious and invisible, causes.

I came to this insight while reading a book titled “Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious” by Timothy Wilson.

The author discusses the unconscious process our minds use in gathering information and how the unconscious process works in tandem with conscious processing.

Often the thoughts and feelings in our conscious mind are mere “confabulations”, or story telling to make sense of the feelings and thoughts we have as a result of unconscious processes.

Reading about this reminded me of the people who talk about God telling them to do something, or the Holy Spirit leading them in a certain direction.

If a person doesn’t know anything about their unconscious or psychological processes, and are unaware of the sophisticated workings of their mind – they will resort to the closest and easiest explanation that they have at hand.

What they resort to first is usually the ingrained idea that has been repeatedly presented to them, often from an early age, that it is God or the Holy Spirit working through them or speaking to them.

This is another example of religious belief giving a faulty reason or narrative to something that is better explained by natural evolutionary or physiological processes.

In this case, by evolutionary processes I mean the fact that these systems and processes were developed through evolutionary means and serve distinct functions, but are often not clearly available to our consciousness. It is a complicated and multi-layered process, and most people aren’t aware of it in the slightest.

By physiological processes I mean the actual processes that go on in the brain – they are processes that may include our experiences, our memories, emotions, and our sense of “self”. We try to come up with some explanation for these in our conscious mind, but are really unaware of what is happening.

Being unaware of those unconscious processes and how they surface as conscious experiences can be the cause for misinterpretation and misguided attribution.

Rather than the mistaken belief that it is God or the holy spirit which is “guiding” them or speaking to them, I think that what a person experiences is the adaptive unconscious process.

This unconscious process is gathering information and then coming to the conscious experience as a gut feeling, intuition, or flash of insight.

Often a word or a few words will come along with this, and it can have a feeling of “knowing”.

The feeling of knowing may be because the insight or intuition comes from a process that has been working in the unconscious for some time.

The person labels this conscious experience the only way they know how.

Unfortunately, this leads to a false reaffirmation of their belief system, and a false attribution to a non-existent cause.

Rather than giving themselves credit, or understanding the amazing processes of their bodies and brain better, they attribute it to a supernatural force.

These types of experiences are likely the result of an incredible process developed over a long period of time that can provide us with truly significant and meaningful insights into ourselves and our lives.

For a religious person, they may be the voice of God. For a religious person, God may have put these processes in place so He could speak to them through them.

I will agree that this adaptive unconscious process and these experiences of insight that happen as a result, are “miraculous” in a way.

There is a more simple and logical explanation for these experiences – rather than being the “voice of God”. The guidance people feel is not from religious sources, but from the long history of the human race.

“Given that the adaptive unconscious plays a major role in selecting, interpreting, and evaluating incoming information, though, it is no surprise that one of the rules it follows is ‘Select, interpret, and evaluate information in ways that make me feel good’.”
Wilson, Timothy D.. Strangers to Ourselves (p. 39). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

“But Gazzaniga and LeDoux have made the startling suggestion that we all share the tendency to confabulate explanations, arguing that the conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense.”
Wilson, Timothy D.. Strangers to Ourselves (p. 97). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

“People’s behavior is often determined by their implicit motives and nonconscious construals of the world. Because we do not have conscious access to these aspects of our personalities, we are blind to the ways in which they influence our behavior.”
Wilson, Timothy D.. Strangers to Ourselves (p. 97). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

God Does Not Guide