Lordy

Don't you hate it when people who know nothing about religion think they know all there is to know? Here's an example, a lecturer in experimental psychology at Oxford who's just presented research which purports to show striking similarities across cultures in children's understanding of causality - they are, she concludes, open to both scientific and "metaphysical" accounts. An openness to "spirituality," she concludes, appears to be "universal"! Her research compared British and Japanese toddlers. Bear in mind (as she did not) that kids have imbibed an entire culture by the time they're three, that Japanese culture is religiously multiform and full of anime versions of Western ideas, and that "神様 kamisama" does not refer to God (singular, capitalized) as opposed to the Shinto deities/powers (plural, amorphous).

I tested both the Japanese and British children on the same tasks, showing them very accurate, detailed photographs of selected natural and man-made objects and then asking them questions about the causal origins of the various natural objects at both the scientific level (e.g. how did this particular dog become a dog?) and at the metaphysical level (e.g. how did the first ever dog come into being?). With the Japanese children, it was important to establish whether they even distinguished the two levels of explanation because, as a culture, Japan discourages speculation into the metaphysical, simply because it’s something we can never know, so we shouldn’t attempt it. But the Japanese children did speculate, quite willingly, and in the same way as British children. On forced choice questions, consisting of three possible explanations of primary origin, they would predominantly go for the word "God," instead of either an agnostic response (e.g., "nobody knows") or an incorrect response (e.g., "by people"). This is absolutely extraordinary when you think that Japanese religion — Shinto — doesn’t include creation as an aspect of God’s activity at all. So where do these children get the idea that creation is in God’s hands? It’s an example of a natural inference that they form on the basis of their own experience. My Japanese research assistants kept telling me, "We Japanese don’t think about God as creator — it’s just not part of Japanese philosophy." So it was wonderful when these children said, "Kamisama! God! God made it!" That was probably the most significant finding.

I’ve also established that children’s natural concepts of God aren’t purely anthropomorphic. They certainly acquire a conception of God-as-man through their religious education, but no child actually links the representation of, for example, God-as-Jesus with the creator of the world. Rather, their images of God the creator correspond to abstract notions like gas, air, and person without a body. When you press them, they of course fall back on what they’ve been told, saying things like, "I know he’s a man because I saw him on the telly," or "He’s just like my daddy." These are very rational responses, but they’re not natural conceptions formed by children. Rather they’re imposed by the culture in which the children live.

I suppose some gesture toward evolution was out of the question. Had a Japanese co-researcher got 大自然 (nature) listed as a possible answer, I wonder if the results would have been different. On the other hand, what if the British kids had had to choose between "by people," "by the gods and buddhas" (or "by 仏様 buddha(s)") and "nobody knows"? We might have discovered that European kids are by birth skeptics. Sheesh - who pays for this crap research? (Source; source of source.)