Anthropomorphism or Preparedness? Exploring Children's God Concepts

Abstract

Historically, the development of God concepts in human cognition has been explained anthropomorphically. In other words, for children especially, God is a big, superhuman who lives in the sky. Recent empirical research on the development of these concepts may suggest an alternative hypothesis. In this paper, we review this research and outline the "preparedness hypothesis," which suggests that children may be cognitively equipped to understand some properties of God in a non-anthropomorphic way.

Psychologists finding religious belief: Building bridges between developmental cognitive science and cultural psychology

“…Barrett, 2012;Barrett & Richert, 2003;Bering, 2006Bering, , 2011. On the basis of this mechanism, humans are supposedly enabled to generate representations of minds that may not be embodied.…”

“…Barrett, 2012;Barrett & Richert, 2003;Bering, 2006Bering, , 2011. It is speculated that children develop socially by being able to solve problems about anticipating others' thoughts and acting on the basis of a mechanism that enables them to imagine the perspective of another person.…”

Is our brain hardwired to produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive God? A systematic review on the role of the brain in mediating religious experience

“…Indeed, the literature in this field attests to the existence of profound religious experiences in children (see Robinson 1983;Armstrong 1985;Coles 1990;Stower and Ryan 1998). This experience in children may be conditioned by children's "intuitive theism" (default theory of the world) which is independent on cultural-environmental input such as parents' religiosity (atheism/theism), storybooks and family conversations (Evans 2000(Evans , 2001Barrett and Richert 2003;Bering 2004;Kelemen 2004;Kelemen et al 2005;Richert and Barrett 2006;Bloom 2007). …”

Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of “Religion”

“…We can see the overlap between "religion" and "magic" more clearly if we look at Subbotsky's list of magical beliefs alongside the religious beliefs to which children are biased. Viewed in tandem, Keleman's promiscuous teleology (Kelemen, 1999a,b) and Barrett's bias toward purposeful design (Barrett & Richert, 2003;Barrett, 2013), in so far as they are linked to a deity, rest on the belief that the deity has powers of "mind-over-matter" (i.e., the power to direct things toward a goal or think them into existence) that Subbotsky views as the core of magical thinking. Similarly, we find that Subbotsky considers animates that know everything, can see in people's minds, and attend to all tasks at once as "magical animate entities."…”

“…Similarly, we find that Subbotsky considers animates that know everything, can see in people's minds, and attend to all tasks at once as "magical animate entities." Barrett and Richert (2003) view children's recognition that God and "special agents" know more than humans as a reflection of children's bias toward overestimating the information to which minds have access. "Children begin reasoning about God, people, animals, ghosts, and other intentional beings using a flexible and general intentional agent concept that includes many default values that more closely approximate some theological notions of God than mature understandings of humans" (p. 310).…”