Children naturally categorize the world into different kinds of things. If the child is not certain about where to draw the boundaries or misattributes properties from one area to another, the child is going to be thinking supernaturally. For example, if a child thinks that a toy (physical property) can come alive at night (biological property) and has feelings (psychological property), this would represent a violation of the natural order of things. If the child thinks that thoughts can transfer between minds, he is misunderstanding what a thought is and where it comes from. Children who mix up the properties of their naive categories are thinking supernaturally. Inanimate objects that come alive and have feelings are magical. A thought transferring between minds is otherwise known as telepathy.
In hundreds of interviews with children between the ages of four and twelve years, Piaget asked them to explain the workings of the world.41 He asked them about natural phenomena such as the sun, clouds, rivers, trees, and animals. Where do they come from? Do they have minds? And so forth. What he discovered was recurrent supernatural beliefs, especially in the youngest children. They thought that the sun follows them around and can think. That’s why children paint smiley faces on suns. It’s much more reassuring to think of it as a friendly being who makes summer days pleasant and people smile than as an inanimate ball of nuclear energy that would frazzle us if it were not for the earth’s protective ozone layer. The children Piaget studied believed that trees have minds and can feel. In short, they thought the inanimate world is alive, something Piaget called ‘animism’. Animism means attributing a soul (Latin, anima) to an entity, and it can be found in many religions as well as in secular supernaturalism. Where do children get these ideas? No one tells them to think like this. It’s just the way the child makes sense of the world.
One reason children make these sorts of mistakes is that they make sense of everything from their own perspective. Piaget recognized that young children are so caught up in their own worldview that they interpret everything in the world according to the way it relates to them. Piaget called this ‘egocentrism’ to reflect this self-obsessed perspective. The sun does appear to follow you around, as it is always there when you look over your shoulder.
Children also attribute purpose to everything in the world by assuming things were made for a reason. The sun was made for me. This is not surprising considering that modern children are immersed in a world of artefacts that have been designed and made for a reason. Young children do not readily make the distinction between things that have been created for a purpose and those that just happen to be useful for a purpose. For example, if I can use a stick for prodding, I may be inclined to see sticks as having a purpose. In other words, sticks exist as something for me to use.
This way of thinking leads the child to what has been called ‘promiscuous teleology’.42 Teleology means thinking in terms of function – what something has been designed for. This way of thinking is promiscuous because the child over-applies the belief of purpose and function to everything. For example, there are 101 ways to travel down a hillside, including walking, skipping, running, roller-blading, skateboarding, sledding, skiing, trail-biking, Zorb balling, and so on. But no adult would make the mistake of saying that the hill exists because of any of these different activities. Children, on the other hand, say that hillsides are for rolling down and so on.
Most seven-year-olds explain the natural world in terms of purpose. As we saw in the last paragraph, promiscuous teleology may incline the child to view the world as existing for a purpose. That’s why the creationist view of existence is so intuitively appealing.43 Most religions offer a story of origins and purpose, which is why creationism fits so well with what seems natural at seven years of age. Maybe that’s the origin of the Jesuit saying ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’
Children are also prone to ‘anthropomorphism’, which means that they think about nonhuman things as if they were human. It’s easy to see this happen with pets and dolls, which children are encouraged to treat as human. However, children might also think that a burning chair feels pain or that a bicycle aches after being kicked. They imagine how they would feel if they were burned or kicked and, because of their egocentrism, they misapply this view to everything, including inanimate objects.44
Even adults easily slip into this way of thinking. Have you ever lost your temper at an object? Usually it’s one that has let you down at a critical moment. The car that dies on the way to an important meeting or, more often in my case, the computer that crashes when you have not backed up your work. Anthropomorphism explains why you talk nicely, beg, and then threaten machines when they act up. It’s just the natural way to interact with objects that seem purposeful. We know that talking to objects has absolutely no effect, but we still do it.
So the origins of supernatural beliefs are within every developing child. All of these ideas are not new. The philosopher David Hume wrote about mind design and supernatural beliefs and identified the same aspects of mind design more than two hundred years ago. Hume recognized the same childlike reasoning in adults when trying to make sense of the world. Adults too see a world of things that seem alive with human qualities.
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to everything, that hurts or pleases us. Hence . . . trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.45
From this perspective, we can see how an egocentric, category-confused child is going to hold beliefs that are the origins of adult supernaturalism. To begin, children have difficulty distinguishing between their own thoughts and those of others. A child who has an idea thinks that others also share the same idea. Such a notion would be consistent with telepathy and other aspects of mind-melding. Also, children may believe they can affect reality by thinking, which is the basis for psychokinesis: the manipulation of physical objects by thought alone. Children report that certain rituals, such as counting to ten, can influence future outcomes, which is equivalent to spells and superstitions. They also believe that certain objects have special powers and energies. This is sympathetic magical thinking that links objects by invisible connections. To top it all, children see life forces everywhere. Anyone holding such misconceptions could easily succumb to a supersense. This is why I think that adult supernaturalism is the residue of childhood misconceptions that have not been truly disposed of.
DO CHILDREN REALLY BELIEVE?
Do children realize that their misconceptions are supernatural? Young children do not use or understand the word ‘supernatural.’ Rather, when faced with something inexplicable, they are more likely to say that it is ‘magic.’ What do they mean by this? The word has lost its sinister connotation and is now used in everyday language. From ‘magic markers’ to ‘Magic Johnson’, the term is synonymous with anything special. In recent years, developmental psychologists have begun to question whether children really do believe in magic. After all, they don’t try to conjure up cookies when they are hungry, and they know their imaginary friends are just make-believe. In one study, pre-school children were asked to imagine that an empty box contained a pencil.46 They could do this easily, but they did not actually believe that there was a pencil inside. When another adult entered the room asking to borrow a pencil, the children did not make the mistake of offering them the one that they had imagined in the box.