How does belief or unbelief in God change our biology, thoughts, and identities?

These are reading notes in progress, bringing research on religious experience into conversation with Christian accounts of spiritual formation. Study findings, theological claims, and questions for further reading are distinguished throughout. Coverage of unbelief is still limited.

Key terms & illustrated glossary ↓

Belief and Attention

What would it mean for faith to change how we see another person?

To believe that every person bears God's image is one thing. To attend carefully to someone we dislike is another. What connects the conviction to the encounter? What practices might help, and how would we recognize a change beyond someone's account of themselves?

Start with experience

Tanya M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (2020). The closest book to the question of how God becomes a felt presence in everyday life. Luhrmann investigates the work people do to sustain relationships with invisible beings. Her emphasis on practice offers a way to examine faith as something cultivated over time. Book and chapter previews.

Luhrmann, Kara Weisman, and colleagues, “Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths” (2021). Start with this freely available paper. Four studies involving over 2,000 people across five countries connect reported spiritual presence with two factors: porosity, a model of the boundary between mind and world as permeable, and absorption, a tendency to become immersed in experience. These are findings about reported experiences and their correlates; they don't establish whether a perceived divine presence has an external divine source. Full text.

Reading question: when someone says “God spoke to me,” how much concerns the experience itself, and how much concerns its interpretation? Applying this paper to ordinary coincidences is a further question: its focus is vivid experiences of spiritual presence.

An ordinary garden and an extraordinary presence occupy the same scene. Compare the pale figures behind Joan with her fixed gaze and outstretched hand: what does it feel like when familiar surroundings become a place of calling? The paintings throughout this notebook offer ways to explore its questions; they aren't evidence for the psychological mechanisms under discussion.

Examine the spectrum hypothesis

Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock, “Psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders of the social brain” (2008). A close theoretical predecessor to the proposed autism–psychosis spectrum. Their model contrasts reduced and excessive attribution of mental states. It's a hypothesis about social cognition, not a general scale measuring how many connections someone sees. Author-hosted paper, with commentaries.

Read alongside Robyn Langdon and Jon Brock, “Hypo- or hyper-mentalizing: It all depends upon what one means by ‘mentalizing’” (2008). Their commentary challenges a single continuum: mentalizing abilities can come apart, and psychosis can involve both under-attribution and over-attribution. The diagnoses should not become shorthand for “missing connections” and “seeing too many connections.” Commentary abstract.

Crespi, Natalie Dinsdale, Silven Read, and Peter Hurd, “Spirituality, dimensional autism, and schizotypal traits: The search for meaning” (2019). The most direct empirical match. In a nonclinical undergraduate sample, overall spirituality correlated negatively with autistic traits and positively with positive schizotypal traits, particularly through the search-for-meaning dimension. But belief in God itself was uncorrelated with autistic traits. Most associations were small. Self-report trait measures in students don't establish a continuum between clinical diagnoses or a causal explanation of faith. Full text.

Mechanistic and mentalistic cognition

This distinction sharpens the starting question. In Crespi and Badcock's framework, mechanistic cognition concerns physical processes and causal relationships; mentalistic cognition concerns minds, including beliefs, intentions, and emotions. These are two ways of making something intelligible. Definitions and discussion: section 4.1 and response R6.1.

Three explanations of one call

The first two explanations can both be true. The third adds a further attribution that needs its own justification. Discovering how a call happened doesn't by itself establish or rule out an intention behind it. Recognizing the friend's intention doesn't establish God's intention either.

Hypothesis: part of the cognitive leap in providential faith is moving from “this happened” to “someone meant this for me.” That's more specific than seeing connections. It involves attributing a mind, interpreting an intention, and locating myself within a relationship. It describes one possible form of faith, rather than every conception of God.

This connects to the agent–arena relationship: an event can become something I experience as addressed to me, calling for gratitude, trust, or a response. In the 4P vocabulary, we can ask what I accept as true, what stands out in experience, how I respond, and who I become through that relationship. These are questions for investigation, not findings established by the diagram.

Reading the curves

Figure 4 is a proposed model, not a plot of measured scores. Its caption says the curve shapes aren't known. “Hyper-mentalizing” shouldn't be read as more accurate understanding of other minds: excessive attribution can also be mistaken. Table 1 in the original paper assembles the authors' proposed contrasts, rather than a diagnostic checklist. Figure 4 and caption.

Keep the explanatory distinction separate from the claim that two diagnoses occupy opposite ends of one dimension. Nor should we equate mechanistic cognition with atheism and mentalistic cognition with theism: understanding a friend's intentions is already mentalistic, without requiring belief in God.

A useful next reading is “Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern” (2016). Across eight studies, it reports an association with empathic concern but no evidence of an association with its nine mentalizing measures. That complicates a simple “more mentalizing means more belief” story; it doesn't establish that believers are better people.

Reading question: What makes an event feel personally addressed to me, and how could I distinguish a warranted interpretation from an attractive one?

Theory of mind

Theory of mind concerns understanding ourselves and others in terms of mental states: what someone knows, believes, wants, or intends. An everyday example is recognizing that a friend can sincerely believe something I know is mistaken. Their behavior makes sense in light of their information, rather than mine.

Ahmad Abu-Akel's commentary, “Theory of mind in autism, schizophrenia, and in-between” (2008), distinguishes the capacity to represent mental states from how that capacity gets applied. He uses this distinction to refine the proposed continuum, rather than reject it. Read the commentary, pp. 261–262.

Competence and performance

The commentary also distinguishes representing one's own mental states from representing someone else's. This opens a question about interpreting events: can I distinguish what I hope an event means from what I think another agent intended? We shouldn't use the commentary's diagnostic descriptions as blanket accounts of autistic people or people with schizophrenia.

Attributing a mind to God

Four questions extend this distinction to faith in a personal God. They aren't a validated scale:

• Capacity: can I imagine a being with knowledge and intentions? That ability doesn't require believing the being exists.
• Attribution: do I interpret this particular event as the action of such a being?
• Content: what do I think God knows, wants, or intends for me?
• Confidence and revision: how certain am I, and what could change my interpretation?

Someone could understand a religious account of God's intentions while rejecting it. Someone else could believe in God while remaining cautious about interpreting particular events as messages. This separates the ability to think about a divine mind from the willingness to attribute an event to it.

It also sharpens the agent–arena question: what changes when I experience myself as known by another mind? “God knows what I'm going through” could orient a person differently from “this event has an impersonal cause.” That proposed change concerns relationship and lived perspective, as well as a proposition about God's existence.

For the 4Es, a further question is how understanding others develops through conversation, shared activity, bodily expression, and social surroundings. For the 4Ps, we can ask how being able to describe another's perspective differs from knowing how to respond and becoming someone within that relationship. Neither framework should simply be relabeled “theory of mind.”

Reading question: Are we investigating someone's capacity to understand minds, their tendency to attribute intentions, or the accuracy of a particular interpretation?

Who do we believe God is?

What kind of mind do I feel known by? Belief in a personal God leaves this question open. Someone might understand God as caring, demanding, forgiving, unpredictable, or distant. The hypothesis is that these expectations shape how a situation feels and what responses seem available.

Interpreting a setback

The same person could move between these readings. A distant God could feel like freedom to one person and abandonment to another; a loving God can also be understood as demanding justice. The question is how someone experiences the relationship in a particular situation.

What I affirm and what I expect can differ. “God is loving” might be someone's explicit conviction while rejection is what they emotionally anticipate. A study of 415 Christian young adults (2012) distinguished doctrinal representations of God from experiential ones. Participants rated God's attributes differently depending on whether they described what they thought they ought to believe or what they personally felt. Experiential ratings were less positive, and experiential representations explained unique variation in life satisfaction. These were self-reports, so they don't establish that changing a God image changes someone's outlook.

Attachment asks whether God feels available and responsive. In a study of 1,041 Presbyterian members and elders (2010), secure attachment to God was associated with less psychological distress, and anxious attachment with more. Once attachment was accounted for, loving or remote images of God had no independent association with distress. That complicates a simple story in which a positive description of God automatically makes life feel safer: the experienced relationship matters too. The study was observational and measured distress, rather than a general worldview.

This connects to the agent–arena relationship: “I'm loved even when I fail” and “I'm continually being judged” could make the same world offer different possibilities for action. It also gives us a question for the 4Ps: when does a proposition about God's love become a felt perspective, a practice of trust, or part of who someone understands themselves to be? That's an application of the framework, not a result these studies tested.

Experience can also shape someone's idea of God. In “Conflict Changes How People View God” (2020), making intergroup conflict more salient experimentally increased how important participants considered a punitive God. That result concerns an immediate judgment, rather than a lasting change in faith, but it gives us reason to investigate how experiences of the world also shape religious expectations.

Reading question: When someone says “God loves me,” what changes in how they meet uncertainty, failure, or another person's need? We'd want to measure those responses over time, alongside their felt relationship with God, to test the proposed influence on outlook.

Becoming an Image Bearer

How does the God someone worships shape the person they become? The question reaches beyond interpreting a setback. It concerns what someone learns to notice, desire, and do when no one is watching. If I understand God as merciful, does receiving mercy make me more willing to offer it? If I expect constant condemnation, do I become more watchful of myself and others? These are possibilities to investigate over time, alongside the influence of family, community, and temperament.

The father's embrace meets a son still wearing rags. The clothes and ring waiting beside them make restoration visible as a return to belonging. Read the scene alongside the question above: if someone comes to expect this kind of welcome from God, might they become more willing to welcome another person who has failed?

Bearing the Image, Growing Into It

Imago Dei means “image of God.” Genesis 1:26–27 describes humanity as created in God's image. This gives the inquiry two distinct questions: what does every person already bear, and what can a person grow into? Being an image bearer isn't a reward for religious belief, intelligence, or moral achievement.

Christian accounts have emphasized capacities such as understanding and freedom, relationship with God and others, and the vocation to care for creation. A Catholic synthesis, Communion and Stewardship (2004), sections 6–24 and 44–48, brings these together and describes salvation as the restoration of the image through Christ. On this account, the whole person, including the body and relationships, participates. The language of a mind being “molded” catches only part of it.

Romans 12:2 and 2 Corinthians 3:18 connect transformation with the renewal of the mind and becoming like the Lord through the Spirit. These texts raise a question about formation: can sustained attention to God change how a person attends to everyone else? They give a theological account of transformation; the prayer studies above investigate particular experiences and practices within that much larger claim.

Sharing in Divine Life

For He was made man that we might be made God;

Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, 54.3, in the translation reproduced by New Advent.

This startling sentence belongs to an argument about Christ overcoming corruption and death. Theosis, or deification, names participation in divine life through grace. It doesn't mean acquiring God's identity or becoming an independent deity. In this account, transformation depends on communion with God. Calling it a change of mindset would leave out the central theological claim.

For the 4Ps, this suggests a question about participatory knowing: what changes when someone understands their life as received from, and lived with, God? The framework can help formulate that question without deciding whether the claimed communion is real.

What Love Trains Us to Notice

My weight is my love; by it am I borne wherever I am borne.

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, XIII.9.10, in the translation reproduced by New Advent.

Love has direction in this passage: what a person loves carries them toward something. Read beside the cognitive question, it suggests looking at what repeatedly captures attention and organizes choices. Someone may profess love of God while habitually seeking approval, control, or security. Spiritual formation would have to reach those habits of desire. What would change in an ordinary disagreement if being right ceased to matter more than understanding the other person?

Prayer Put Into Practice

our Lord does not care so much for the importance of our works as for the love with which they are done.

Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, IV.23, in the 1921 English edition.

Writing about advanced prayer, Teresa directs attention back to action and the love within it. That gives this notebook a demanding question: does a vivid sense of God's presence lead to greater patience, generosity, or willingness to repair harm? Feeling transformed and treating people differently need separate examination.

Look toward the steps: care takes the form of supporting a wounded body and bringing someone to shelter. The scene makes Teresa's question concrete. What would a change in prayer become in the way a person spends their time, accepts inconvenience, or responds to a stranger's need?

A study could follow concrete responses over time: acknowledging a mistake, helping someone outside one's group, or remaining attentive to a person who is difficult to love. Reports from other people would matter alongside the believer's own account. Such observations could investigate formation without treating moral growth as exclusive to religion or as proof of a divine cause.

Reading question: If I am being formed in God's image, what should become visible in the way I encounter another image bearer?

Read the counterevidence

Ara Norenzayan, Will Gervais, and Kali Trzesniewski, “Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God” (2012). An influential study linking mentalizing and belief in a personal God. The title reflects the authors' framing; read it as a specific empirical claim, not a description of every autistic person's religious life. Full text.

Pair it with David L. R. Maij and colleagues, “Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do” (2017). Across five studies, the authors found inconsistent support for mentalizing as a predictor and stronger evidence for cultural learning: witnessing people act credibly on their religious commitments during upbringing. This complicates an explanation based mainly on individual cognitive style. Full text.

Reading question: are we explaining the ability to imagine a divine mind, the feeling that God is present, or why someone adopts and maintains a religious belief?

How things become significant

Shitij Kapur, “Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience” (2003). A framework for how experiences can acquire unusual significance and how delusional explanations may develop around that significance. Useful for distinguishing “these events connect” from “this event feels overwhelmingly important.” It's a theory of psychosis, not evidence that religious faith is psychosis. Abstract and publication details.

Justin L. Barrett, “Exploring the natural foundations of religion” (2000). An entry into the cognitive science of religion: how ordinary cognitive processes can support religious concepts, their transmission, and their use. Abstract and publication details.

Michiel van Elk, “Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs” (2015). Helps make “seeing connections” experimentally precise. Results depend on the task; detecting an agent and categorizing an ambiguous image are different demands. Paranormal belief measures should not automatically stand in for faith. Full text.

The philosophical leap

William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896). Start here for the leap from uncertainty to commitment. James argues that practical and emotional commitments may legitimately decide an intellectually unresolved choice when it is live, forced, and momentous. He distinguishes seeking truth from avoiding error: prioritizing one can cost us the other. This is a restricted argument about when belief is permissible, not proof that a desired belief is true. Read sections I, IV, and VII–X. Full essay in the collected volume.

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written as Johannes Climacus. Read the discussion of subjective truth and inwardness. It brings the question toward how an existing person commits under objective uncertainty. Its existential account of faith should be distinguished from a cognitive mechanism for detecting patterns. Selected primary text.

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), chapter 6. A challenge to the assumption that faith must arise from an inferential leap. His model allows belief in God to arise directly in experience, rather than through an argument. This is a philosophical model of how belief could have warrant under specified conditions, not empirical confirmation of a God-detecting faculty. Chapter text.

What is belief?

A working definition: to believe a claim is to take it to be true, with consequences for what we expect, infer, and do. Belief needn't involve certainty or constant conscious attention. Hoping that someone will help, imagining that they will, and believing that they will are different attitudes toward the same possibility.

This gives us three questions: What do I take to be true? How confident am I? How does that commitment show up in my life? Someone's stated convictions and habitual responses can diverge. That gap is something to investigate, rather than automatic evidence of insincerity.

There's a useful debate here. Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious credence is not factual belief” (2014), argues that religious credence often functions differently from ordinary factual belief, including in its sensitivity to context, authority, and evidence. Neil Levy, “Religious beliefs are factual beliefs” (2017), challenges that distinction: ordinary beliefs can also vary with context, while religious beliefs can guide behavior beyond religious settings. Read these as competing accounts of how beliefs function, not a settled finding that believers don't really believe. 2014 paper; 2017 abstract.

Belief is one part of a posture toward the world. That posture also includes habits, emotions, skills, relationships, and trust. The 4Ps let us examine this broader orientation without calling every bodily habit or feeling a propositional belief.

What does it take to believe in God?

The Crespi finding raises a further question: what are we calling belief? For this notebook, separate three possible meanings:

• Assent: accepting that God exists.
• Relationship: trusting God, praying, or organizing life around that commitment.
• Felt presence: experiencing God as close, responsive, or active in particular events.

These are questions to distinguish, not stages everyone must pass through. The 2019 result doesn't establish what is necessary or sufficient for any of them. It suggests that a measure of belief in God need not track a broader measure of spirituality in the same way.

We should investigate several possible routes: testimony and upbringing; philosophical reasoning; interpretation of experience; and participation in religious practices. Maij and colleagues' work above makes cultural learning especially important to keep in view. A capacity that helps someone imagine a personal God isn't, by itself, an explanation of why they believe in that God.

Atheism and theism

Theism affirms a God or gods. “Atheism” can name either an absence of that belief or the positive belief that no gods exist; these aren't identical positions. We should record which meaning a study measures. Agnosticism concerns knowledge or uncertainty and, depending on usage, can overlap with belief or nonbelief. Atheism alone doesn't specify a complete worldview, an ethics, or an attitude toward meaning.

Will Gervais, Maxine Najle, and Nava Caluori, “The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach” (2021). In a nationally representative US sample of 1,417 people, with preregistered analyses, lower exposure to credible displays of religious commitment was a stronger predictor of disbelief than reflective cognitive style or mentalizing. These are observational associations, not proof that upbringing determines belief. They point toward an interaction between cognition and cultural learning. Abstract and open-access paper.

Gervais and colleagues, “Analytic atheism: a cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon?” (2018). Across 3,461 participants in 13 societies, the association between cognitive reflection and disbelief appeared in the aggregate but was robust in only three individual countries. This complicates the familiar “intuitive believer versus analytical atheist” story. Neither label identifies a single cognitive style. Abstract and open-access paper.

The comparison should therefore ask how people acquire, sustain, and revise their commitments through testimony, reflection, experience, and practice. The studies above don't establish distinct “theist brains” and “atheist brains.” Nor does explaining a belief's origin settle whether it's justified or true; that applies to disbelief too.

How might believing change the brain?

The direction of explanation can run both ways: cognitive habits may affect religious belief, while religious practices may affect cognitive habits. But “belief changes your brain” bundles together several different claims.

Activity during prayer. Uffe Schjoedt and colleagues, “Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer” (2009), used fMRI with Danish Christians. Improvised personal prayer engaged regions associated with social cognition, including the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction. The authors interpret this as consistent with experiencing prayer as interaction with a responsive other. This measures activity during a task; it doesn't show that conversion permanently reorganizes the brain or that these regions are exclusive to religion. Study abstract.

Changes through practice. T. M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “‘Lord, Teach Us to Pray’: Prayer Practice Affects Cognitive Processing” (2013), randomly assigned 101 Christians to imagination-based prayer or Gospel lectures for four weeks. The prayer group reported more vivid imagery and unusual sensory experiences, with differences on some cognitive tasks. This offers experimental evidence about a specific practice among existing believers. It measured reports and task performance, not brain structure; it also doesn't isolate religious belief from the effects of imagery training. Author-hosted paper.

A possible mechanism. Michiel van Elk and André Aleman, “Brain mechanisms in religion and spirituality: An integrative predictive processing framework” (2017), propose an account in which expectations help shape religious experience. This gives us a theoretical bridge between an existing belief and how ambiguous events are experienced. It's a framework to test, not a demonstration that all religious experience follows one mechanism. Abstract and publication details.

A possible feedback loop:

A religious interpretation becomes available → practice directs attention → some experiences become more vivid or significant → those experiences are interpreted as divine → commitment may deepen.

The papers support parts of this proposal; they don't demonstrate the entire loop. We should also ask what interrupts it: unanswered prayer, competing interpretations, doubt, or experiences that conflict with expectations.

For “God's hand in my life,” the next hypothesis is that faith changes the weight given to events. An unexpected call might become easier to notice, remember, and interpret as care. That extension to autobiographical meaning still needs its own evidence.

The strongest claim these readings presently support is that particular religious practices can engage social cognition and alter aspects of attention, imagery, and reported experience. Establishing lasting neural changes caused specifically by belief in God would require longitudinal evidence that separates belief from practice, community, and other changes in a person's life.

Faith through the 4Es and 4Ps

The 4Es broaden the question about how faith changes the brain to include the body and world a believer lives in. The 4Ps help us distinguish what “knowing God” might mean. They aren't matching sets, and we shouldn't map each E to one P.

The 4Es: how cognition happens

4E cognition brings together embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended approaches. These approaches don't agree on every claim. A central debate concerns whether something outside the brain influences cognition or actually constitutes part of it. Newen, Gallagher, and de Bruin, “4E Cognition: Historical Roots, Key Concepts, and Central Issues” (2018).

These are proposed applications to faith:

• Embodied: bodily capacities and states shape cognition. What do kneeling, singing, breathing, and bodily feelings contribute to prayer?
• Embedded: cognition depends on its surroundings. How do a congregation, shared stories, and a place of worship make certain interpretations available?
• Enactive: sense-making arises through active engagement. What becomes intelligible through practicing forgiveness or prayer that wasn't intelligible beforehand?
• Extended: some cognitive processes may include tightly integrated external resources. Could a prayer journal or beads form part of remembering and sustaining attention? An object isn't automatically part of cognition just because it's religious or helpful.

This changes the unit of inquiry: we can investigate a person praying with others, in a place, using particular practices and objects, alongside measuring neural activity.

Try a 4E reading: attend to posture, architecture, objects, and the exchange between figures. How does the scene's meaning depend on cultural knowledge and embodied action? A painted book isn't automatically an example of extended cognition; that would depend on its role in an actual cognitive practice.

The 4Ps: what knowing involves

Vervaeke and Mastropietro's framework distinguishes four interrelated ways of knowing. A recent paper by Hüseyin Beyköylü, John Vervaeke, and Daniel Meling reviews and revises it through enactive and Buddhist philosophy. It's a theoretical framework, not four established brain modules. “The four ways of knowing” (2026), especially section 2.

Possible applications to faith:

• Propositional — knowing that: “God exists.” What claims does someone accept, and why?
• Procedural — knowing how: knowing how to pray, attend, or participate in a ritual.
• Perspectival — knowing from here: how a situation feels and what stands out within it. An unexpected kindness might be experienced as grace.
• Participatory — knowing through being in relation: how engagement shapes who someone is and the world they inhabit. Faith might involve becoming someone who lives as loved by, responsible to, or in relationship with God.

Participatory knowing isn't simply attending a group. The question is how someone's identity and ways of relating are formed through engagement.

The fallen figure and scattered companions give conversion a bodily form. For participatory knowing, the question extends beyond this pictured moment: what changes in someone's identity and commitments afterward? Place this dramatic interruption beside the gradual practice loop. A changed life could involve both sudden encounters and repeated engagement.

Consider one act of prayer: what does someone believe, know how to do, experience, and become through it? The diagram separates these questions using imagined examples. Someone can know how to pray without feeling heard, or feel heard while remaining uncertain about God.

Return to the cognitive leap

The hypothesis becomes more specific: a change in propositional belief might follow changes in skill, perspective, or identity. Someone might begin praying before they're certain what they believe, then find that the practice changes what feels significant. Or they might accept a theological argument without experiencing a personal relationship with God. These are possible paths, not a necessary sequence.

Luhrmann's prayer experiment gives us a possible empirical connection to procedural and perspectival change. Calling those findings “4P changes” is an interpretation; the experiment didn't directly test this framework. Similarly, Crespi's spirituality measures shouldn't be relabeled as measures of the four kinds of knowing.

This also sharpens “seeing connections.” We can ask which connections become relevant to someone, and how their practices and commitments shape that relevance. That's a question about learning to notice and respond, as well as detecting patterns.

The philosophical issue remains: becoming skilled at a practice, feeling a presence, or undergoing a transformation doesn't by itself establish the truth of a claim about God. We'd still need to ask how each way of knowing can be mistaken, challenged, and corrected.

Possible thesis to explore: Faith may involve learning to inhabit a relationship with God, with changes in what someone does, notices, and understands about who they are. Assenting to “God exists” captures only one part of that possibility.

Belief and the agent–arena relationship

The agent–arena relationship gives us a way to explore “posture toward the world.” In the 4P framework, participatory knowing concerns how agents and their arenas develop in relation: who I become through engagement, and what my world makes possible for me. Perspectival knowing concerns what stands out from my particular situation. Beyköylü, Vervaeke, and Meling (2026), sections 2.3–2.4.

For this inquiry, distinguish:

• Agent: who I understand myself to be, together with my capacities and commitments.
• Arena: the material and social world I engage with, encountered as meaningful situations.
• Affordances: possibilities for action that arise in that relationship—what I can do here, given who I am and the situation I'm in.

An arena isn't just an opinion projected onto a passive world. Other people, bodily needs, and material circumstances constrain and answer a person's actions. Engagement can change both the person and their surroundings.

The field offers different possibilities to someone who knows how to harvest: wheat to cut, bundles to carry, shade in which to rest. Skills and tools help make this an arena of work and shared life. Bruegel idealizes the labor for a wealthy patron, but the scene offers a useful comparison: how might learning a religious practice change what someone notices and knows how to do in familiar surroundings?

Consider a friend who calls after prayer. Here's an imagined comparison, not a claim about all believers or nonbelievers. One person might experience the call as God's care expressed through a friend: “I'm someone who can receive help; this is an invitation to trust.” Another might experience it as human solidarity: “I'm part of a network of care; this is an invitation to receive and reciprocate.” Both can thank the friend and offer help in return. The difference concerns an additional attribution of divine agency, not the presence or absence of connection and meaning.

The hypothesis is that a change in belief can alter expectation (what might happen), attention (what seems significant), and response (what seems possible or called for). Repeated responses may then change relationships, skills, and identity, feeding back into belief. This is a proposal for investigation, not an experimentally established sequence.

The 4Es locate this process in bodies, practices, communities, and sometimes integrated tools. The 4Ps distinguish accepting a claim, learning ways to act, experiencing a situation differently, and becoming someone through those relationships. Conversion or deconversion might involve changes across several of these dimensions, at different times.

Neither theism nor atheism specifies a single posture. The question of who we believe God is adds the content and felt quality of a relationship to the question of belief. Leaving religion could also be experienced as liberation, loss, or both. These possibilities make the lived details worth studying rather than inferring them from a label.

A sharper question: when a belief changes, what changes in who I can be, what the world seems to offer or demand, and how I respond? Alongside it, keep the epistemic question: what would count as evidence that my interpretation is mistaken?

Glossary

Nine terms used in this notebook, with plain-language explanations and examples. The diagrams are reading aids, not models of brain activity.

First reading session

• Read Genesis 1:26–27, Romans 12:2, and 2 Corinthians 3:18 beside the spiritual passages above. Distinguish bearing God's image, growing in likeness, and the changes a psychological study could actually measure.
• Read Confessions XIII.9, On the Incarnation 54, and The Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions IV, in context. What does each writer think changes: desire, participation in divine life, or love expressed through action?

• Read Luhrmann and colleagues' 2021 paper: introduction and discussion, then methods and results. Track the distinction between experience and attribution.
• Read James's “The Will to Believe,” especially sections VII–X. Ask whether trust creates access to evidence, and when that argument becomes circular.
• Read Crespi and colleagues' 2019 paper alongside Maij and colleagues' 2017 paper. Compare what each actually measures.
• Read Ahmad Abu-Akel's 2008 commentary, pp. 261–262. Separate representing a mental state from applying that understanding, then ask which part a study's task actually tests.
• Read “God Representations, Attachment to God, and Satisfaction With Life” (2012) alongside the 2010 Presbyterian attachment study. Distinguish a description of God, a felt relationship with God, and an outlook on the world. Which did each study actually measure?
• Read Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted's 2013 prayer experiment, then Schjoedt and colleagues' 2009 fMRI study. Distinguish changes in experience, task performance, and brain activity.
• Read the 2018 introduction to 4E cognition and section 2 of Beyköylü, Vervaeke, and Meling (2026). Use them to develop questions for the faith studies, while keeping the frameworks distinct from the studies' actual measures.
• Read Gervais, Najle, and Caluori (2021), then the 2018 cross-cultural study. Ask which measures distinguish upbringing, reflection, belief, and religious identity.
• Read Van Leeuwen (2014) alongside Levy (2017). Ask what would distinguish a different kind of belief from a difference in how strongly or consistently someone holds it.

Working question to carry forward: How do attention, interpretation, and trust turn an event into a sign of God's presence—and what would justify that interpretation?

A second question: What makes belief possible, and how does living as a believer change what one subsequently experiences as evidence?

A question about formation: How does the God someone worships shape what they love, who they become, and how they treat another person?