The role of religious context in children's differentiation between God's mind and human minds

Abstract

The current study examined the cultural factors (i.e., religious background, religious participation, parents' views of prayer, and parents' concepts of God) that contribute to children's differentiation between the capabilities of human minds and God's mind. Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Religiously Non‐Affiliated parents and their preschool‐aged children were interviewed (N = 272). Children of Muslim parents differentiated the most between God's mind and human minds (i.e., human minds are fallible but God's is not), and children who had greater differentiation between God's and humans' minds had parents who had the least anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Additionally, there was a unique effect of being raised in a Religiously Non‐Affiliated home on the degree of children's differentiation between God's and human minds after religious context factors had been accounted for; in other words, children of Religious Non‐Affiliates differentiated between humans and God the least and their differentiation was unrelated to religious context factors. These findings delineate the ways in which religious context differences influence concepts of God from the earliest formation. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children's concept of God develops during the preschool years. The degree of anthropomorphism in children's concept of God varies. What does this study add? Muslim children have a strong differentiation between what God's mind and human minds can do. Religiously Non‐Affiliated children have almost no differentiation between God's and human minds. Parent anthropomorphism explains variance in children's God concepts, both within and across religious groups.

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

“…Finally, dual inheritance models highlight the cultural learning processes (Kline, 2015;Rendell et al, 2011) underpinning religious beliefs (Evans, 2001;Lane et al, 2012;Richert et al, 2017;Willard et al, 2016) and disbelief, and largely predict that context-biased social learning -especially CREDs (Henrich, 2009)would be strongly associated with degrees of religious belief (Gervais & Najle, 2015). Our dual inheritance approach predicts that CREDs would be most important, followed by other factors such as cognitive reflection, mentalizing, and perhaps existential security.…”

Cognitive pathways to belief in karma and belief in God

“…There may be additional individual differences or cultural influences that could explain why some people hold more or less agentic conceptions of karma. Theological teachings about God's abstract, superhuman attributes, learned over the course of development, play some role in adult's conception of God as distinct from human agents (Barlev et al, 2017(Barlev et al, , 2018(Barlev et al, , 2019Richert et al, 2017;Saide & Richert, 2020); theological teachings conveyed through participation in religious communities may similarly play a role in beliefs about karma. Views of karma may also vary across different contexts.…”

Sorting through, and sorting out, anthropomorphism in CSR

“…Another group of CSR scholars ar ues that God concepts themselves are not, contrary to received wisdom (Piaget, 1929), based on anthropomorphism but rather on a general intentional agent conceptual template which does not assume any human-like limitations on the agent given that, in our evolutionary environment, agents come with a variety of nonhuman-like abilities (Bar ett and Richert, 2003;Bar ett et al, 2001;Knight et al, 2004;Richert et al, 2016a;Richert et al, 2016b;Richert and Smith, 2010;Shtulman and Lindeman, 2016). God is nonhuman-like inasmuch as it is not restricted by a body, time, or space.…”