God has often been painted in Christian art, but the Bible provides no consistent clues about how the Almighty is supposed to look (or if God has a face at all). And as the researchers found, when the images of all the more God-like mug were averaged together, it looked like this. [...]
This picture isn’t meant to be a definitive image of how Americans view God. “It is really about appreciating the psychological factors behind why we might see God differently than somebody else,” says Joshua Conrad Jackson, the lead author of the study. And the results hint that our views of God reflect our biases and identities. That is, we want a God that looks and thinks like us. [...]
A new set of participants (who didn’t rate the original photos) described the averaged photo of God as being younger, more masculine, attractive, whiter, intelligent, and loving compared the anti-God photo. Jackson says that despite individual differences in how people might perceive God, it’s nice to know that, on average “the warmth and the lovingness comes first in our minds, at least.” [...]
They look very, very similar, nearly identical. But there are some small differences when participants rated them side by side. “The conservatives’ God was perceived as more masculine, older, more powerful, and wealthier than the liberals’ God,” the study finds.
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