Child's God

God as Superknowing

Developmental research in the theory of mind area over the past two decades converges on the conclusion that young children have an early bias to overestimate the knowledge and belief-accuracy of others. This bias to assume superknowledge of others renders young children (e.g., 3- to 4-year-olds) able to reason more accurately about God than about their parents, because unlike their parents, God is indeed superknowing. A series of experiments conducted by Barrett and Richert with 3- to 7-year-olds both in the United States and Mexico among the Yukatec Maya, has demonstrated that even when children begin to understand the fallible nature of beliefs and limitations on knowledge, they may continue to reason about God as superknowing. That is, they need not anthropomorphize. Some evidence suggests that even 3-year-olds begin to discriminate God's mind as more knowledgeable than other minds.

God as Superperceiving

Similar to their tendency to overestimate others' knowledge, 3-year-olds often have difficulty understanding that just because they perceive something a certain way, not anyone or everyone else perceives it the same way. Consequently, they might mistakenly assume that the book page that appears right-side up to them also appears right-side up to their mothers, for whom it is actually upside down. By age 5, children's ability to appreciate another's visual perspective approximates that of adults. Two sets of studies by Richert that investigated children's understanding of seeing, hearing, and smelling, support these findings. While the youngest children reported that a human would be able to see, smell, and hear things that were actually imperceptible, and the oldest children said that the human would not, a large majority of all children answered that God would perceive all. Even young children embraced decidedly different properties for God as compared with humans.

God as Creator

Other lines of research have questioned the prevalence of what Piaget termed “childhood artificialism,” or the notion that the natural world was created by humans, and suggests that very young children can also understand God as distinct from humans in creative capability. Petrovich has shown that British preschool-aged children are rather disinclined to credit people with the creation of natural things, and also that they are up to seven times as likely to attribute origins of natural objects to God instead of people. Other studies support the notion that children may have strong dispositions to understand the world as created, but not created by humans.

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