Belief in Divine Intervention Scale

Abstract

The Belief in Divine Intervention Scale (frequently referred to in psychometric literature as the BDIS or BOIS) is a concise, six-item, self-report psychometric instrument developed by Douglas Degelman and Donna Lynn (1995) to measure an individual’s explicit cognitive endorsement of direct supernatural actions in the empirical world. While the broader psychology of religion encompasses multidimensional constructs such as religious orientation, spirituality, and institutional adherence, the scale specifically targets the construct of divine agency manifesting within mundane human affairs, such as physical healing, supernatural communication, and alterations of meteorological or natural phenomena. Designed as a unidimensional scale, the instrument was distilled from an initial ten-item candidate pool via corrected item-total correlation thresholds ($r > .60$). Respondents evaluate each item along a balanced 6-point Likert-type agreement continuum ranging from -3 (“strongly disagree”) to +3 (“strongly agree”), with items scored from 1 to 6 after accounting for two reverse-coded items.

Psychometric evaluations demonstrate high internal consistency reliability across heterogeneous demographics, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .910$ in the combined initial validation sample, $\alpha = .898$ within a secular community college sample ($n = 145$), and $\alpha = .924$ within an evangelical Christian liberal arts college sample ($n = 59$). Exploratory principal components analysis confirmed a robust unidimensional factor solution, with all six retained items exhibiting primary factor loadings between $.811$ and $.845$, explaining a substantial proportion of the total variance. Concurrent and construct validity assessments indicate strong positive associations with subjective religious importance ($r = .78, p < .001$), while demonstrating non-significant correlations with generalized external locus of control and just-world beliefs ($p > .10$), establishing divergence from secular deterministic schemata. The instrument exhibits substantial utility for researchers in clinical health psychology, cognitive science of religion, social psychology, and behavioral medicine, although investigators are cautioned regarding potential ceiling effects when deployed within homogenous, highly conservative theological populations.

Keywords

Belief in Divine Intervention Scale, divine agency, psychology of religion, psychometrics, supernatural attribution, miraculous healing, religious cognition, unidimensional scale, locus of control, health psychology

Authors

The Belief in Divine Intervention Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically evaluated by:

• Douglas Degelman, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Vanguard University of Southern California (formerly Southern California College), Costa Mesa, California, United States. Dr. Degelman’s scholarship emphasizes social psychology, the psychology of religion, cognitive attributions, and applied research methodology.
• Donna Lynn, B.A. — Department of Psychology, Vanguard University of Southern California, Costa Mesa, California, United States.

The authors published their initial validation study in the Journal of Psychology and Theology under the title “The Development and Preliminary Validation of the Belief in Divine Intervention Scale” (1995).

Purpose

The central aim of the Belief in Divine Intervention Scale is to provide an empirically grounded, brief, and psychometrically sound assessment tool that quantifies the degree to which an individual believes that a supreme deity (specifically God within monotheistic conceptualizations) actively, intentionally, and supernaturally alters physical, biological, personal, and atmospheric events on Earth. Prior to its construction, many scales in the scientific study of religion aggregated distinct theological tenets into expansive, omnibus indices measuring institutional religiosity, religious fundamentalism, or abstract mystical affect. Such global instruments frequently conflated deistic religious identification—wherein a transcendent entity creates the universe but observes immutable natural laws without interference—with active theistic or interventionist worldviews, wherein God functions as an immediate causal agent.

In clinical, medical, and health psychology contexts, distinguishing between generic religious commitment and belief in active divine intervention is essential. Patients navigating severe, life-threatening somatic pathologies (e.g., metastatic oncological diagnoses, end-stage organ failure) frequently mobilize religious coping mechanisms. For individuals holding potent interventionist convictions, medical treatment decisions, adherence to pharmacological regimens, and end-of-life palliative decisions are deeply colored by expectations of spontaneous remission, faith healing, or miraculous recovery. Measuring this construct accurately allows medical providers, clinical psychologists, and hospital chaplains to anticipate how patients process medical prognoses, assess patient agency versus divine reliance, and provide ethically nuanced, culturally competent care that respects patient spirituality without compromising informed consent.

In empirical social and cognitive psychology, the scale provides a focused lens for exploring attribution theory, existential threat management, and epistemological beliefs. Researchers employ the scale to inspect how cognitive mechanisms (such as hyperactive agency detection and teleological reasoning) interact with cultural conditioning to generate beliefs about supernatural agency. Furthermore, the scale enables cross-disciplinary investigations into how interventionist beliefs buffer psychological distress during collective traumatic events, including pandemics, natural disasters, and structural socio-economic collapse, where human agency is experienced as insufficient.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct evaluated by the instrument is belief in divine intervention. Psychometrically and theoretically, this construct represents a specific domain of supernatural causal attribution wherein human beings perceive non-contingent, non-material transcendent agency acting directly within the spacetime continuum. The instrument models this construct as a unidimensional psychological continuum ranging from total skepticism (the belief that supernatural forces do not alter physical phenomena) to absolute affirmation (the conviction that divine will routinely supercedes natural physical laws).

Although the scale operates unidimensionally, Degelman and Lynn (1995) drafted an initial 10-item pool capturing multiple distinct operational manifestations of supernatural causality. Through empirical distillation, the final six items reflect four interconnected manifestations of divine agency:

• Supernatural Physical Remission and Somatic Healing: This facet captures the cognitive affirmation that divine intervention directly alleviates or eradicates organic somatic pathologies that otherwise adhere to biological and oncological courses (e.g., Item 1: “God sometimes directly intervenes to heal individuals of diseases like cancer”; Item 5: “Real miracles of healing from God do not occur today” [reverse-scored]). Here, divine agency overrides biological determinism.
• Direct Divine-Human Communication and Noetic Transmission: This dimension assesses belief in bidirectional interpersonal contact between the deity and human consciousness, either through internal audible or intuitive communication or through sleep states (e.g., Item 2: “God sometimes communicates directly with individuals”; Item 6: “God sometimes uses dreams to communicate with us”). This taps into relational religious cognition and divine interaction.
• Intervention in Macro-Environmental and Natural Phenomena: This facet captures the belief that divine volition can redirect macro-level meteorological, geological, or atmospheric systems, interrupting deterministic physical laws (e.g., Item 4: “God sometimes directly intervenes to change the course of damaging weather conditions like hurricanes”).
• Global Interventionist Schema: This core ideological dimension reflects an overarching, decontextualized ontological stance regarding divine involvement in human everyday existence (e.g., Item 3: “God does not intervene directly in our lives” [reverse-scored]). This global item functions as the theoretical anchor for the unidimensional latent trait.

Theoretical Framework

The scale is anchored in the convergence of psychological attribution theory, religious coping theory, and the cognitive science of religion. Foundational attribution theorists, notably Fritz Heider (1958), Harold Kelley (1967), and Bernard Weiner (1985), posited that humans possess an innate cognitive imperative to assign causal explanations to unexpected, consequential, or ambiguous events to render their environment predictable and controllable. When standard secular, scientific, or mechanistic explanations fail to alleviate existential uncertainty, individuals activate supernatural causal schemas.

Ritzema (1979) and Ritzema and Young (1983) formalized the construct of God as Causal Agent within empirical psychology, demonstrating that individuals possess stable cognitive schemas that assign supernatural causality to mundane occurrences. These attributions are not merely compensatory delusions born of desperation; rather, they represent structured cognitive frameworks acquired through sociocultural learning and religious socialization. When an individual witnesses an unexpected recovery from an illness or a sudden alteration in atmospheric conditions, the interventionist schema is primed, leading to the attribution: “God intervened.”

Within health psychology and behavioral medicine, Kenneth Pargament’s (1997) theory of religious coping categorizes divine intervention beliefs within collaborative and deferring coping styles. In collaborative religious coping, individuals view themselves as active partners working alongside an intervening God; in deferring coping, individuals surrender personal agency, anticipating that the deity will unilaterally resolve crises. The scale measures the cognitive prerequisite for both coping styles: the fundamental conviction that the divine agent possesses both the capacity and the inclination to intrude into physical reality.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the instrument was initially established through face validity, content validity, principal components analysis, and concurrent construct validation analyses reported by Degelman and Lynn (1995).

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was assured during the initial item construction phase. An original pool of ten items was authored to represent various phenotypic expressions of miraculous intervention (somatic healing, interpersonal communication, meteorological disruption, and generalized life intervention). To eliminate psychometrically redundant or statistically diffuse items, only items exhibiting corrected item-total correlations exceeding $r = .60$ were retained, yielding the final six-item instrument. Face validity is exceptionally transparent: each statement clearly articulates an explicit theological proposition concerning divine agency.

Concurrent and Convergent Validity

Concurrent validity was tested by examining theoretical correlations with established psychometric constructs:

• Importance of Religion: Degelman and Lynn administered the single-item religious commitment metric validated by Gorsuch and McFarland (1972). Scores on the scale correlated strongly and positively with self-rated religious importance ($r = .78, p < .001$), confirming robust convergent validity with core religious motivation.
• God as Causal Agent and Divine Influence: The construct aligns conceptually with the God as Causal Agent Scale (Ritzema, 1979) and the Divine Influence Subscale of the Child Improvement Locus of Control (CILC) scales (DeVellis et al., 1985), demonstrating congruent conceptual coverage of supernatural locus of control.

Discriminant Validity

To verify that the scale does not simply measure generalized external locus of control or generalized cognitive biases, the authors correlated scale scores with:

• External Locus of Control: Assessed via Levenson’s (1981) IPC (Internal, Powerful Others, Chance) scales. Scores did not exhibit significant correlations with external locus of control ($p > .10$), demonstrating that belief in an intervening personal deity is psychologically distinct from perceiving one’s life as governed by arbitrary secular authorities or blind chance.
• Belief in a Just World: Assessed via O’Neill et al.’s (1988) measure. No significant relationship emerged ($p > .10$), confirming that belief in divine intervention is not an artifact of believing the world is inherently fair and just, but rather reflects an independent theological and metaphysical framework.

Reliability

The scale demonstrates strong internal consistency reliability across multiple independent and pooled academic cohorts:

• Combined Sample ($N = 209$): The total sample of undergraduate participants produced a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .910$, indicating high homogeneity of items without excessive redundancy.
• Secular Community College Cohort ($n = 145$): Within a sociodemographically diverse, non-sectarian public community college student sample, the instrument exhibited a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .898$. The mean score for this cohort was $M = 20.38$ ($SD = 10.49$), demonstrating broad variance and normal distribution across the entire continuum.
• Christian Liberal Arts College Cohort ($n = 59$): Administered within a private evangelical liberal arts college affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination, the scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .924$. The cohort mean was $M = 32.92$ ($SD = 3.64$) out of a maximum possible score of 36.

The substantial difference between the community college mean ($20.38$) and the Christian college mean ($32.92$) was statistically significant ($t$-test, $p < .001$), providing strong known-groups criterion validation. No statistically significant differences in scale scores were observed as a function of biological sex, suggesting measurement invariance across gender. Degelman and Lynn noted that within the Christian college sample, a pronounced ceiling effect occurred, restricting the observed standard deviation ($SD = 3.64$) relative to the community college cohort ($SD = 10.49$). Consequently, the authors explicitly cautioned that the instrument is less suited for discriminating nuanced variance among individuals located entirely within homogeneous, dogmatically fundamentalist Christian populations.

Factor Analysis

Degelman and Lynn (1995) performed exploratory principal components analysis (PCA) to evaluate the dimensional architecture of the six-item instrument. The analysis was conducted both on the combined sample ($N = 209$) and independently on the community college subsample ($n = 145$).

In both factor extractions, a single dominant eigenvalue emerged, accounting for the vast majority of total item variance. In the combined sample ($N = 209$), all six items exhibited exceptionally high component loadings onto the primary, unrotated factor:

• Item 1: “God sometimes directly intervenes to heal individuals of diseases like cancer.” — Component Loading: .836
• Item 2: “God sometimes communicates directly with individuals.” — Component Loading: .845
• Item 3: “God does not intervene directly in our lives.” (R) — Component Loading: .821
• Item 4: “God sometimes directly intervenes to change the course of damaging weather conditions like hurricanes.” — Component Loading: .811
• Item 5: “Real miracles of healing from God do not occur today.” (R) — Component Loading: .829
• Item 6: “God sometimes uses dreams to communicate with us.” — Component Loading: .814

The uniformly elevated loadings (ranging strictly between $.811$ and $.845$) confirm an integrated, unidimensional latent construct. Secondary factors failed to meet Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and fell below the inflection point on the scree plot. Identical structural patterns were replicated when the PCA was restricted exclusively to the community college sample, verifying that the scale’s unidimensionality is not an artifact of aggregating secular and religious subsamples.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Belief in Divine Intervention Scale (BDIS / BOIS)
• Authors: Douglas Degelman, Ph.D., and Donna Lynn, B.A. (1995)
• Construct Measured: Self-reported cognitive belief in active, direct supernatural intervention by God into physical, biological, communicative, and environmental human affairs.
• Test Type: Paper-and-pencil or digital self-report psychological questionnaire.
• Target Population: General adult and adolescent populations; suitable for collegiate, clinical, medical, and community samples.
• Item Count: 6 items.
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes.
• Response Format: Balanced 6-point bipolar agreement Likert-type scale with numerical and semantic anchors for every point:
  • +3 = strongly agree
  • +2 = somewhat agree
  • +1 = slightly agree
  • -1 = slightly disagree
  • -2 = somewhat disagree
  • -3 = strongly disagree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Numerical Conversion: Prior to summation, ratings are converted to a continuous positive integer metric from 1 to 6 as follows:
    -3 becomes 1; -2 becomes 2; -1 becomes 3; +1 becomes 4; +2 becomes 5; +3 becomes 6.
  • Reverse Scoring: Items 3 and 5 are negatively keyed and must be reversed prior to computing the total score:
    Converted Score 1 becomes 6; 2 becomes 5; 3 becomes 4; 4 becomes 3; 5 becomes 2; 6 becomes 1.
    Formula: $\text{Item}_{\text{reversed}} = 7 – \text{Converted Score}$.
  • Total Score Calculation: Compute the algebraic sum of all six item scores (Items 1, 2, $3_{\text{rev}}$, 4, $5_{\text{rev}}$, 6).
  • Score Range: Minimum possible score is 6; maximum possible score is 36. Higher scores reflect a stronger, more pervasive belief in direct divine intervention.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed and published in 1995 by Dr. Douglas Degelman and Donna Lynn. The initial psychometric paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Journal of Psychology and Theology. As typical with academic psychometric scales published within scientific literature, the instrument was placed in the public academic domain for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scholarly research purposes, provided appropriate attribution and scholarly citation are rendered to Degelman and Lynn (1995). No licensing fees or proprietary royalties are mandated for basic research application. Investigators intending to deploy the scale within commercial diagnostic software, revenue-generating clinical platforms, or corporate environments should contact the copyright holders or Vanguard University’s Department of Psychology for formal commercial permission.

References

• Degelman, D., & Lynn, D. (1995). The development and preliminary validation of the Belief in Divine Intervention Scale. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 23(1), 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164719502300104
• DeVellis, R. F., DeVellis, B. M., Revicki, D. A., Lurie, S. J., Runyan, D. K., & Bristol, M. (1985). Development and validation of the Child Improvement Locus of Control (CILC) scales. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 3(3), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.1985.3.3.307
• Gorsuch, R. L., & McFarland, S. G. (1972). Single vs. multiple-item scales for measuring religious values. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11(1), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384300
• Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). University of Nebraska Press.
• Levenson, H. (1981). Differentiating among internality, powerful others, and chance. In H. M. Lefcourt (Ed.), Research with the Locus of Control Construct (Vol. 1, pp. 15–63). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-443201-7.50006-3
• O’Neill, P., Duffy, C., Enman, M., Blackmer, E., Goodwin, J., & Campbell, E. (1988). Cognition and citizen participation in social action. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18(12), 1067–1083. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1988.tb01202.x
• Pargament, K. I. (1997). The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. Guilford Press.
• Ritzema, R. J. (1979). Attribution to supernatural causation: An important component of religious commitment. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 7(4), 286–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164717900700407
• Ritzema, R. J., & Young, C. (1983). Causal schemata and the attribution of supernatural causality. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 11(1), 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164718301100105
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)