Psychology’s Purgatory: Situating the Theoretical Construction of Agency

Abstract

The notion of God (or any version of deities in any societies) is not a theoretical concept in scientific psychology. It is a notion that needs to be explained itself—from the perspective of psychological theories. Religious phenomena are crucial for scientific psychology. When seen from the perspective of cultural psychology, all religious systems in the World emphasize one or another kind of transcendentality persuasion upon the upcoming generations. Human beings are persuaded that they themselves need to have the will to believe in agency that is located beyond the borders of their immediate accessibility. What is at stake here is the infinity of the agentive role of human beings—the imperative of “you should believe more” and “even more” and “even more”—and so to infinity (or a stop in that process—at death or conversion to atheism, yet another infinite belief system). Psychology needs to create a theoretical understanding of such infinite belief systems that reach a high level of extension in time—as shown by history of all religions—and generalizing abstraction. The religious domain is the best arena for study of processes of hyper-generalization of signs—yet it needs to proceed beyond William James in its sophistication of analysis.