Reply #24: Interesting article, but seems to contain a fundamental fallacy

[Land Shark]

Can we imagine a person, believing in God, maintaining a position that is not only at odds with the will of God, but CONSCIOUSLY and thus intentionally contrary to God's will, for even a minute? Not really -- a believer would either scramble to distinguish God's will from his or her own, or else change their position TO MATCH God's will. That is, a correspondence, even a direct correspondence and not just a correlation, is what a believer properly seeks after, so to cite this correspondence as evidence of pure egocentricity is a fundamental mistake in that it conflates those who truly seeks and follow God's will regardless of their personal beliefs with those who follow only what's amenable to them personally.

That being said, despite a fundamental and near-dangerous distortion (if the summary above in the OP is a fair one) I think the article is useful and certainly deserving of publication as stimulus for an important discussion. Whether it comes to God, or the public good, or public policy, all too often what is claimed to be the Ultimate Good is just a personal opinion colored all too much by self interest. Understood this way, research like the above can have a healthy effect on not only religion but politics and philosophy as well. Understood more narrowly, research like the above is likely to create more heat than light.

Surely, there are all too many believers who impute to God their personal prejudices. The problem is that those who are not doing this, but instead truly seek God's will outside their own predilections in an earnest fashion, will also adjust their personal position to match God's if and whenever they are able to ascertain God's will. According to the study, however, this latter group of earnest, selfless believers will be measured as "egocentric" anthropomorphic believers in a god of convenience. Conflating these two is more than just a fine point, they're more like polar opposites being conflated.

On edit: TO prove the apparent thesis above, (given that correspondence beteen one's own beliefs and those attributed to God can't do the job) one would have to prove that there's no such thing as religious conversion/transformation that has causation outside the person; essentially that no one ever persuaded or converted another person to a belief in God that was previously anathema to them. But this would be impossible, since just starting with the famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis would reveal someone who in college was a militant atheist, and then was converted. The study above would seem to classify Lewis as "egocentric" because his beliefs on social issues would essentially match his assessment of God's views on the same. But this just goes to show the study "proves too much" and therefore proves almost nothing at all.