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God concepts General questions How do children and adults think about god(s)? Specifically, what characteristics do they attribute to them and under what circumstances? Are humans used as models when learning or thinking about gods? Are god concepts easily acquired by children, and if so, why? Theory Among adults, it has repeatedly been found that the intuitive expectations of the mind constrain how divine beings are represented, even to the point of contradicting explicitly-held theological beliefs. Barrett & Keil [1] have argued that participants use anthropomorphic concepts of God in understanding stories even though they may endorse theological beliefs that explicitly deny that God is anthropomorphically constrained. Therefore, people may possess two incompatible God concepts and deploy them in different contexts; furthermore, the theologically correct (i.e., non-anthropomorphic) God concept may have limited applicability in everyday cognition. Barrett & VanOrman [2] have further shown that exposure to representations of supernatural entities in religious ceremonies is positively correlated with anthropomorphization. The psychological study of the development of childrens concepts of God started with Piaget [3], who argued that children use human minds as templates to understand Gods mind, and attribute properties of omniscience and omnipotence to both until age 7, when they start perceiving humans as fallible. In recent years, this has been disputed by a number of scholars. Barrett and colleagues [4, 5] have proposed that young children do not need to conceptualize human agency first and then use it as a basis to understand supernatural agency; instead, they argue, children at age 3 attribute true beliefs to all agents, but in the next couple of years they become able to distinguish between different types of agents and adjust their reasoning accordingly. Furthermore, Barrett & Richert [6] have suggested that many supernatural properties attributed to God do not impose undue conceptual burdens on children, because they hold them as default assumptions about all intentional agents. As a consequence, children are supposed to be able to form representations of God easily. This challenge to the anthropomorphism position has been termed the preparedness hypothesis. Makris & Pnevmatikos [7] have recently challenged the preparedness hypothesis, arguing that children instead think of Gods knowledge and perceptual access in human-like terms, but it is unclear whether they are being egocentric or anthropomorphic. The above research deals with the properties of belief and perception, but there are of course many more ways in which god and human concepts differ. Petrovich [8] and Evans [9] have argued that children (regardless of religious affiliation) tend to think of God as having creative power that is immensely superior to that of humans; Gimnez-Das, Guerrero, & Harris [10] have proposed that children assign immortality to God but not to humans. Evidence Barrett & Keil [1] found that US college students struggled to think of God in theologically correct terms (at least as far as the property of omnipresence is concerned) when asked to recall a story. Specifically, although the stories did not imply that God would attend to different tasks sequentially, most participants answers were phrased in these terms. Barrett [11] found that Hindus also display a disparity between stated beliefs about theologically recognized attributes of the gods and the properties they attribute to the gods when performing a narrative comprehension task. Perhaps due to small sample size, Barrett did not
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find differences between different Hindu gods that are traditionally represented as formless (Brahman) and human-like (Krishna). Barrett & VanOrman [2] found that Reformed Christians who use images for God worship tended to anthropomorphize God more than those who did not. Heller [12] found that US children between the ages of 5 and 10 tended to conceptualize God as a superhuman, rather than as the formless, omniscient, omnipotent being described by theologians. Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga [4] showed that children from US Reformed and Lutheran churches treated humans and God as omniscient in a false-belief task until age 4. By age 5, they started to reliably (and correctly) attribute false beliefs to humans, but not to God. Knight et al. [5] replicated this reearch with a sample of Yukatek Maya children, whose pantheon includes the Christian God; while the same effect emerged, it was found to do so only by age 6 or 7. Knight [13] further found that Yukatek children who correctly attribute false beliefs to humans showed a nuanced capacity to attribute similar or dissimilar knowledge to other natural and non-natural entities, consistently with these entities cultural representations. In contrast, Makris & Pnevmatikos [7] have shown that, while the original effect found by Barrett et al. [4] held for their Greek sample, when the contents of a plain box were not revealed to participants 3- to 4-year-olds tended to attribute ignorance to both a human and God, while 5- to 7-year-olds did so to God only (however, Gimnez-Das et al. [10] obtained contrasting results using a similar experimental protocol with Spanish children). Barrett et al. [4] also showed that children readily attributed infallible visual perception, as well as beliefs, to God. Richert & Barrett [14] expanded on this by showing that US preschoolers were able to attribute greater perceptual access (visual, auditory, and olfactory) to God and animals described as having special senses than to humans and normal animals. Barrett, Newman, & Richert [15] have shown that children are able to take into account the background knowledge of different agents (human, God, and animal) when making judgements about whether these agents would understand ambiguous or complex visual displays. Once they understood the displays, 3-year-olds overestimated what the human and animal would know, but 5-year-olds reliably attributed to God a higher capacity to understand. Petrovich [8] asked British preschoolers questions about the origins of natural entities such as plants, rocks, the sky, etc.; children were much more likely to state that God, rather than people, caused them to exist. Evans [9] found the same among fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Christian communities, suggesting that children tend to favour creationist accounts of the origins of natural kinds regardless of level of indoctrination. Gimnez-Das et al. [10] found that Spanish 3-year-olds think of humans and God as immortal, while older children attribute mortality to humans alone; the developmental trajectory of this differentiation resembles that of false-belief attribution. Outstanding issues Which properties of supernatural agents are anthropomorphized? In the case of the Christian God, which of its many attributes e.g., the fact that God is atemporal, immutable, immense, all-loving, perfectly wise are perceived by adults and children in anthropomorphic terms, and which are not? Many of the studies reviewed above use the Christian God as stimulus. Christian children are often taught early on that God became human in the form of Jesus. It is therefore possible that childrens concepts of God are not independent from their concepts of people in general. Do Jewish or Muslim adults and children show the same tendencies?

See also Minimal counterintuitiveness

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References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Barrett, J.L. and F.C. Keil, Conceptualizing a non-natural entity: anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 1996. 31: p. 219-247. Barrett, J.L. and B. VanOrman, The effects of the use of images in worship on God concepts. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 1996. 15(1): p. 38-45. Piaget, J., The child's conception of the world. 1960, Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co. Barrett, J.L., R.A. Richert, and A. Driesenga, God's beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agent concepts. Child Development, 2001. 72: p. 50-65. Knight, N., et al., Children's attributions of beliefs to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence. Cognitive Science, 2004. 28: p. 117-126. Barrett, J.L. and R.A. Richert, Anthropomorphism or preparedness? Exploring children's God concepts. Review of Religious Research, 2003. 44(3): p. 300-312. Makris, N. and D. Pnevmatikos, Children's understanding of human and supernatural mind. Cognitive Development, 2007. 22(3): p. 365-375. Petrovich, O., Understanding of non-natural causality in children and adults: a case against artificialism. Psyche en Geloof, 1997. 8: p. 151-165. Evans, E.M., Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: creation versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 2001. 42: p. 217-266. Gimnez-Das, M., S. Guerrero, and P. Harris, Intimations of immortality and omniscience in early childhood. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2005. 2(3): p. 285-297. Barrett, J.L., Cognitive constraints on Hindu concepts of the divine. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1998. 37(4): p. 608-619. Heller, D.I., The children's God. 1986, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, N., Childrens attributions of belief to natural and non-natural entities -Yukatek evidence. forthcoming. Richert, R.A. and J.L. Barrett, Do you see what I see? Young children's assumptions about God's perceptual abilities. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2005. 15(4): p. 283-295. Barrett, J.L., R.M. Newman, and R.A. Richert, When seeing is not believing: children's understanding of humans' and non-humans' use of background knowledge in interpreting visual displays. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2003. 3(1): p. 91108.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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