God as a Mirror Reflection - God as Verification, not Judgement

I gave a talk last night (my God on Trial talk) which went down a treat. There was a Creationist Christian in the audience who was really good value (all things considered - we had some great back and forth). At one point he pointed out that life is much easier for atheists because you don't have a judgemental god to think about. The idea was that to live up to God's high moral expectations was difficult work.

I retorted that his position was probably the same as mine. This is because most people post hoc rationalise the judgements of their god to fit their own intuitive morality, so it's quite easy to live with a judgemental god! No one thinks they're the villain, and in this way theists add extra verification of their moral behaviour through God.

God is not a judge, but a verifier. Theists' morality is rubber stamped by a deity who conveniently has the same moral compass as the believer.

This sounds very intuitively plausible to me, that we merely create God to reflect our own moral compass, rather than discovering God and adapt our moral compass to reflect God's will. However, there is also good empirical evidence for this. Here is the abstract for Epley et al's paper "Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs":

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

So in some senses, yes it is easier for an atheist, but in others it is just the same, and perhaps harder. We have to create moral frameworks, work hard to decipher meaning and purpose, and toil creatively to those ends. Theists are merely spoonfed bad concepts of these, and end up following their own ideals to their ends in codifying them in their particular concept of God.

Of course, there will always be exceptions to the rule, but you get the idea.

For ideas of the problems with the characteristics of god, please check out my ebook The Problem with God.