Natural-Theological Understanding from Childhood to Adulthood

Olivera Petrovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138939448
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380740
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

It is commonly assumed that young children only begin to think about God as a result of some educational or cultural influence, perhaps provided by their parents. Natural-Theological Understanding from Childhood to Adulthood asks if there is anything about God that children can know independently of any specific cultural input; does their knowledge of God simply come from their everyday encounters with the surrounding world?

Whilst children's theoretical reasoning in biology, physics and psychology has received considerable attention in recent developmental research, the same could not be said about their religious or theological understanding. Olivera Petrovich explores children's religious concepts, from a natural-theological perspective. Using supporting evidence from a series of studies with children and adults living in as diverse cultures as the UK and Japan, Petrovich explains how young children begin to construct their everyday scientific and metaphysical theories by relying on their own already advanced causal understanding. The unique contribution that this volume makes to the developmental psychology of religion is its contention that religion or theology constitutes one of the core domains of human cognition rather than being a by-product of other core domains and specific cultural inputs.

Natural-Theological Understanding from Childhood to Adulthood is essential reading for students and researchers in cognitive-developmental psychology, religious studies, education and cognitive anthropology.

1

INTRODUCTION

The current book is about a little-appreciated aspect of young children’s ­theory-building capacity: their ideas about the origin and structure of the world as a whole (i.e., the universe or cosmos) and conjectures about the nature of its ultimate cause. As such, the book complements a growing body of evidence regarding young children’s ability to construct theories about different aspects of the world, notably those that correspond with scientific domains such as biology, physics and psychology (e.g., S. Gelman & Noles, 2011). It also suggests that children begin their understanding of the world in many ways like the 17th century “natural theologians” or “physico-theologians” did and, indeed, their forerunners many centuries earlier. The history of modern science demonstrates that the search for answers to scientific questions often terminates in metaphysics as exemplified by natural theology (e.g., White, 1967). In this volume I propose that children start with many of the same questions about the natural world and arrive at broadly similar answers about its structure and origin as those reached by their illustrious predecessors. In other words, children’s questions about the physical world lead them, too, to postulate causal agents which transcend the empirical domain altogether.

I will begin by providing a rationale for the main terms in the title of this volume, that is, why “theology” rather than “religion” is a more suitable term for the purposes of describing children’s thought studied here. Most dictionaries define religion as a term that encompasses not only belief in a supernatural power (i.e., God) but also the ways in which the belief is expressed in different cultures and traditions (i.e., dogma, ritual). In much of the anthropological and psychological literature “religion” indeed signifies a cultural variable on account of its multifaceted nature and “culturally transmitted counterintuitive information” (e.g., Lane & Harris, 2014, p. 146; see also Boyer, 2003; Boyer & Walker, 2000). By contrast, theology denotes a theoretical discipline concerned with rational analysis of religious belief (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 1995), “the attempt to talk rationally about the divine” (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1979, p. 632) or “reasoned discourse about God” (Wiles, 1976, p. 1). Given the emphasis in this volume on the theoretical nature of children’s thought about the world as a whole, and the concept of God as a causal inference in the context of the world, I will adhere to the distinction between “religion” as a cultural variable, on the one hand, and “theology” as a conceptual domain, on the other. Such a distinction is consistent with Kant’s view of “physico-theology” as separate from doctrinal religion (1983, p. 523). More to the point, it is consistent with the natural-theological perspective as a framework for studying children’s concept of God as a causal agent, which they construct in the course of processing everyday information about the physical world rather than acquiring it from their culture or religious tradition. Finally, the hyphenated term natural-theology has a dual purpose in the current book: first, to convey its many similarities with the historical “natural theology”, a period in the development of modern science whose luminaries engaged in the study of nature with the aim of comprehending God’s mind as revealed in natural laws (e.g., Brooke, 1991; Hunter, 2009; Lennox, 2009); second, and more pertinently, to highlight its “naturalness”, i.e., prevalence in everyday thought about the world from childhood through adulthood and hence its direct psychological relevance.

Concepts of God in natural-theology

The natural-theological concept of God as a causal agent (i.e., First Cause, Creator, Designer), which does not specifically include God’s moral attributes (i.e., Judge, Redeemer, Saviour), has led some Christian theologians to reject natural-theology as suspect and argue that only revealed theology, rather than one’s own thought, can be the basis for correct reasoning about God (e.g., Moore, 2010). A further criticism of natural-theology is that the very word “nature” is not a neutral term but carries the cultural baggage that we impose upon it, which only reinforces the need for reliance on revelation as a basis for theology (McGrath, 2001). Whilst the emphasis on revelation is undoubtedly of major interest to professional theologians, it is not to the field of psychology, especially developmental. The key psychological issue in the domain of theology is the origin of the concept of God in early cognitive development, something that theologians do not address. Put simply, theologians are not asking the prior, psychological question of how humans come to understand the meaning, and hence accept the possibility, of divine revelation in the first place. To suggest, therefore, that the natural-theological concept of God as a causal agent developmentally precedes the concept of divine revelation does not contradict the mainstream theological view about the importance of revelation but simply draws attention to the core psychological component implicit in all theological reasoning; namely, the concept of God. Finally, although God’s moral agency was not a distinct component of the historical natural-theology, this should not be seen as a reflection of the natural-theologians’ view that God’s moral attributes are irrelevant to human beings but rather that there were no scientific methods available to them for studying those attributes as an aspect of the natural world.

Natural-theology and science: Past and present

As stipulated in The Royal Society Charter (17th century), its Founding Fellows were expected to direct their studies of nature to the glory of God and the benefit of the human race (Brooke, 1991). According to Boyle (1627–1691), for example, science is a religious task in which to “discover the true Nature of the Works of God” (Tambiah, 1991, p. 13). The structure of God’s creation is thus inherently worthy of investigation because it can “teach us about the nature of God”, “while it incidentally also helped us better to understand the phenomena under study” (Hunter, 2009, p. 202).

Contemporary scientists cum natural-theologians have continued to pursue some of its perennial questions in a range of modern scientific fields: biology (Denis Alexander), genetics (Sam Berry), medicine (Francis Collins), materials science (Colin Humphreys), molecular biology (Ken Miller) and physics (Freeman Dyson, John Polkinghorne) as well as mathematics (John Lennox), to mention but a few. Neither in the past nor the present has there been a shortage of scientists seeking to address the questions asked by the original natural-theologians. Claims about scientists as believers or non-believers that are based on public surveys are not always reliable as they offer somewhat superficial and crude categories that lead to contradictory conclusions (e.g., Gross & Simmons, 2009; Larson & Witham, 1999). Whilst some psychologists have recently advanced claims that the majority of scientists are atheists who prefer logic and rational reasoning over an interest in “a reality beyond this world” (Caldwell-Harris, 2012, p. 4), that analytic reasoning promotes religious disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012) and that intelligence and religiosity are negatively correlated (Zuckerman, Silberman & Hall, 2013), such claims need to be evaluated in light of the meanings attached to “supernatural agents” and “religiosity” in those studies. As we will see later in the volume, the category “supernatural” has been used to encompass a host of disparate and incongruous notions, including ancestors, ghosts, gods, rituals and sacrifices, spirits and witches as well as God. Clearly, such definitions of “religion” are in stark contrast to the natural-theologians’ understanding of religion, which does not put any emphasis on rituals and sacrifices but, instead, on the study of the natural world and its laws, interpreting them as an expression of God’s mind. It would be absurd to claim that natural-theologians’ intelligence did not correlate with “religiosity” just because their belief in the Creator was not motivated by any of the “functions of religiosity” on which contemporary scholars of religion have focused.

The continuing importance of the questions addressed by natural-­theology is evident from the contemporary religion–science debate where even non-believing scientists play an active role either by challenging, or being challenged by, the opposing views. Hawking (1988), for example, does not rule out the existence of God but rather thinks that God may not be necessary to explain the origin of the universe, which he considers to be, in principle, fully explicable in terms of the laws of physics. But, Lennox (2009), a mathematician and a Christian, is critical of the claim that the laws of physics, and not God’s intention, explain how life on Earth began, pointing out that laws are merely descriptions of what happens under certain conditions rather than the laws themselves being endowed with a creative capacity. In agreement with the natural-theologians of the past, Lennox proclaims that it is the beauty of scientific laws which reinforces his own faith in an intelligent, divine creative force at work rather than making the idea of such a force superfluous. I convey the points above mainly to highlight their psychological relevance (i.e., as instances of causal reasoning) and thus as a prelude to describing in this volume evidence from young children asking and answering the very same questions. That these are indeed psychological issues is implicitly acknowledged by Lennox when he appeals to the religious experiences of millions of believers as a given that should not be lightly dismissed.

Science and religion: Psychological issues

The fact that both science and religion make ontological assumptions about the nature of reality and share concerns about the nature of causality is of direct interest to psychology. This is because psychological science is interested in explaining the assumptions themselves; that is, how early in development, and under what conditions, do specific assumptions about the world begin to emerge. Put differently, psychology’s distinct role among the sciences is to identify the developmental trajectories of concepts from different domains, physical as well as metaphysical, in order to elucidate their respective roles in our theories about the world. Although much more scholarly effort has gone into studying children’s scientific concepts than their metaphysical or religious concepts, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the two conceptual domains interact already in childhood.

Yet a number of scholars have argued that scientific and religious thought are fundamentally opposed. According to the views espoused by this group of scholars, there is no way of resolving the conflict between the two because religion purports to offer scientific explanations even though it conveys none of the truthful statements that science does (e.g., Arieti & Wilson, 2003; Blakemore, 2009; Dawkins, 2006). It is especially interesting that such claims often appeal to some psychological factors (e.g., inferior reasoning capacity among believers, emotional vulnerability) yet without citing any purposely obtained psychological evidence to corroborate them. Paradoxically, the same scholars acknowledge that spiritual beliefs of one form or another are universal, almost as defining of humanity as language is, yet reject any parallels between the capacity for language and that for religion by arguing that the universality of language is grounded in the specialised areas of the human brain, whereas “religion” occurs as a result of a misconception of human intentionality, thus making it akin to visual illusion (Blakemore, 2009). It is pertinent to convey that Blakemore is equally “dubious about those ‘why’ questions” that humans ask universally and considers them to be either senseless or translatable into the “how” questions “that science answers so well”. In other words, he considers both the “why” questions and “religion” to be curious universals in that they lack a specific link to the brain. Instead, Blakemore’s conviction is that, once we find out how our brains generate religious ideas and what the Darwinian adaptive value of such brain processes is, nothing will be left for religion. Yet, a number of leading neuroscientists (e.g., Coltheart, 2006; Miller, 2010; Passingham & Rowe, 2015) have dampened such optimism, without even mentioning religion specifically, by pointing out that we first need to develop testable hypotheses about how exactly the brain generates ideas of any kind.

Another example of the “conflict” view to mention briefly is that based on the assertion that science, unlike religion, deals with unambiguous data obtained by independent methods, all of which ensures widespread consensus among scientists and facilitates determining the core concepts that constrain reasoning in each scientific domain so that its progress can be measured (Chinn & Brewer, 2000). Chinn and Brewer’s point is only valid if we accept their definition of religion as consisting of “beliefs, dogmas and rituals” rather than the natural-theological one adopted in the current book. As for the claim that only science has core concepts, the simple fact is that no psychological research has so far attempted to establish whether there are any core religious or theological concepts, although several psychologists have expressed the view that there could be no such concepts in relation to religion (see below). Suffice it to say at this point that when Chinn and Brewer are contrasting religion (as a cultural domain) and science (as a cognitive domain) they are comparing apples with oranges, which, of course, do have different cores. Last, but not least, their overly positive evaluation of clarity and consensus among scientists is amply contradicted by the history of science, which provides numerous examples of considerable ambiguities in science, too, and hence plenty of scope for interpretation and disagreement about scientific data and theories (e.g., Haldane, 1924; McLeish, 2014).

Although the “conflict” view of the science–religion relationship has been prominent in the literature, some distinguished scientists have argued that science and religion should be seen as completely independent yet complementary (e.g., Einstein, 1940; Gould, 1997). What the independence and conflict perspectives share, however, is the view of religion as a form of culture rather than a conceptual domain. In contrast, two other patterns of the science–religion relationship discernible in the history of modern science, namely, dialogue and integration (Barbour, 1998), perceive the two domains as sufficiently conceptual to engage with and maintain a relationship. The best known historical representative of integration is “natural theology” (“physico-theology”), discussed above, whilst its contemporary perspective is the “theology of science” view (McLeish, 2014, p. 170). According to McLeish, a physicist, the long history of human impulse to understand the world is recorded in the Bible, not least in the form of the questions that appear to foretell science (e.g., Job 39–42). Such a long-standing interaction between the two kinds of quest – religious and scientific – has furnished a basis of a fruitful relationship in the history of science, which has led McLeish to reject both the conflict and complementarity positions but endorse the view that science and theology are simply “of each other” (2014, p. 209).

The point of my brief review of the science–religion relationship is not only to draw attention to some of the weaknesses of the “conflict” perspective on the science–religion interaction but, more importantly, to claim that many of the questions commonly perceived as either scientific (i.e., pertaining to physical sciences) or theological are actually psychological, yet not recognised as such by the proponents of either side of the debate. Their passionate arguments, from Hume to contemporary critics of religion, never mention psychological research as at all relevant to the question of whether religious thought, as such, is indeed “non-rational”. Thus Grayling, a prominent philosopher, in an interview to The Oxford Student proclaimed: “It is very hard to imagine people of real intelligence signing up for the ‘man on the cloud’ type of view of religion, which of course many people do sign up for” (2012, pp. 20–21; italics added). What such misconceptions about “religion” in human cognition clearly demonstrate is the need for separating its two components: (1) cultural and (2) psychological (i.e., conceptual).

Bearing in mind some of the controversies mentioned above, one might conceivably come to the view that scientific study of religious concepts is not at all possible, not least because such concepts involve mental representations of non-material entities. This, of course, depends on the judgement of whether we can have objective evidence about mental states of any content given that mental states, as such, are unobservable aspects of human behaviour. In psychological research, however, verbal and other behavioural responses are the recognised tools for expressing mental states and, as such, can be used for rendering mental states observable as well as measurable, provided that the relevant methodological requirements are met. As a leading experimental psychologist argued forcefully, “It is perfectly legitimate to include [as data] the statements made by human beings, as long as the differences between such responses correspond to differences between other stimuli or other responses” (Broadbent, 1972, p. 41). In the case of “religion”, stimuli may consist of any objects or symbols (e.g., words) capable of eliciting the target concept(s) whilst ensuring that they are not confounded with any other, apparently similar, concepts, which can be expressed verbally. Indeed, scholars from cognate disciplines, notably neuroscience, have endorsed Broadbent’s point that behavioural evidence is essential in scientific psychology and therefore any progress in the study of mental states depends on the availability of methods for observing and measuring such states and controlling the stimuli that can elicit and influence them (e.g., Miller, 2010).

Scientific reasoning: Common points with theology

The commonalities between scientific and natural-theological reasoning from antiquity to modern times can be highlighted by identifying several components that they share. For example, being able to (1) recognise indeterminacy, (2) evaluate evidence, (3) make judgements about plausibility and (4) coordinate theory and evidence, which Kuhn (2002) singles out as fundamental to scientific reasoning, are equally characteristic of natural-theological reasoning. To further the example, recognising indeterminacy implies the need to establish not only whether the relevant evidence is available or possible to obtain but, also, what may count as evidence in specific situations. This last point is especially important because many scientists are aware of there being impenetrable limits to our understanding that will continue to pose a challenge to science and metaphysics alike (Rees, 2011).

In an attempt to account both for the fluidity and developmental deficits in scientific reasoning, owing to its multiple components, Amsel and colleagues (2008) proposed a dual-processing model of reasoning that encompasses (1) analytic and (2) experiential forms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Causal understanding: Physical and metaphysical
• 3 Children’s theories: Scientific and non-scientific
• 4 Early ontological knowledge: The world and its contents
• 5 In the beginning: Cosmological reasoning in children and adults
• 6 The natural-theological concept of God: A unique causal agent
• 7 Theology as a core cognitive domain
• 8 Innateness of religion within the limits of science alone
• 9 conclusions, exclusions and some implications
• References
• Appendix
• Author Index
• Subject Index