Salv Ridino

Through the 'i' of the Soul Salv Ridino

This is a revised dissertation submitted for the MSc in Social and Public Communication (LSE). Abstract: Much literature in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) field suggests that the subjective experience of God is not considered as relevant to explain the belief in supernatural agency. Instead, my personal experience suggests that subjective experience is key to the understanding of such a phenomenon. Therefore, this study aims to fill the gap in the literature of CSR by exploring how the subjective experience of God is understood amongst three different groups, namely: Christians, atheists, and Gnostics. A sample of seven participants per each group was purposefully recruited across different locations in England. Participants were individually interviewed and a thematic analysis, with a slant of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), was employed to draw similarities and differences among the interviewees. Psychological phenomena such as: self, agency, intersubjectivity, and ontological categories were found to be relevant to the subjective experience of God. Surprisingly, findings also showed that the differences between categories of belief can be fuzzy.