When it came to religious stories, predictably children raised in religious settings classified them as true, while kids raised in secular setting classified them as fictional.
For the “fantastical” version 3) God was replaced with some other fantasy mechanism.Īll across the board, children thought the historical narratives were true. For the “historical” version 2) they told the same story of Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, but they took out all the references to God and miracles: Moses crossed the water in a boat. They then changed that story in two ways. An example of 1) was telling kids the story of Moses parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could walk through on dry land. They gave a total of 66 kindergartners three different narratives: 1) religious, 2) historical, and 3) fantastical. Here’s how Corriveau and her colleagues conducted their research. Further, argue the researchers, “exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction.” In other words, said Kathleen Corriveau, one of the study’s co-authors, the study found that childhood exposure to religious ideas may influence children’s “conception of what could actually happen.” She also told me her research suggests that Barrett’s Born Believers thesis is wrong - that children don’t possess an “innate bias” toward religious belief. Published in the July issue of Cognitive Science, the article presents findings that seem to show that children’s beliefs in the supernatural are the result of their education. Or, as he put it to me over the phone, “children have a number of natural dispositions to religious beliefs of various sorts.” And while he believes that these dispositions can “certainly be overridden by certain kinds of cultural and educational environments,” he thinks the research shows that a child’s cognitive “playing field is tilted toward religious beliefs.”Ī new study out this month, however, pushes against Barrett’s conclusion.
Barrett called Born Believers. Barrett, currently a researcher at Fuller Theological Seminary, has spent his career researching children and religious belief. After observing that children tend to believe that the world has order and purpose, he came to the conclusion that kids are born with a tendency toward thinking that there is some sort of supernatural agent behind this order. That’s the thesis of a 2012 book by psychologist Justin L. What if children didn’t have to be taught to believe in God? What if they were born with that ready-made belief somewhere embedded in their minds?
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