The Origin of Childhood Faith

Today is the first day E goes back to school for another semester at the MGMS.

Like all young toddlers, Dylan’s been trying to cope with the many changes in his life including getting used to sleeping in his new big boy’s bed, and last night was the second time he has been waking up at 5 kicking and screaming, soothed only by his milk bottle and even after then he’d stay awake. I’m not sure if we are doing the right thing by still giving him a feed so early in the morning, but I tell myself at least he is drinking something nutritious.

Anyway, the point is Daddy’s left for school since 8, and within 15 minutes the exhausted little boy fell right to sleep again.

As much as I’d like to grab the chance to catch up on lost sleep, I find myself here, sitting up in bed with my good ol’ Macbook on my lap, compelled to write about something else.

In this entry, I’m going to pause for a little while from the usual rambling about motherhood, and about our move over to Australia.

About 5 years ago, I started this blog because I needed to space to get all these thoughts out, thoughts and questions about my life, and how it relates to my understanding of faith and God and such.

Since then, life pretty much took over, and aside from the irregular outbursts in these pages I find myself having less and less time to just stop and think.

But some weeks ago something happened that brought me back to this place. Facing this need once again to get these thoughts out before I forget and these musings also forget me.

My brother, CS, had sent an email link to a Google book preview on Einstein and Religion. Basically a scholarly book documenting how Einstein is far from the atheist that many modern atheists look up to as the face of Reason against blind dogmatic religion.

So I clicked on the link and proceeded to find out about Einstein’s formative years, his thoughts of divinity and how it relates to his life’s work, especially with his General Relativity of Time theory.

As a Jewish scientist, Einstein was under incredible pressure from the intellectual circle to write about the utter lack of rationality concerning religious dogma. Yet, the book records that he and his wife regularly attended Bible study within their circle of friends – moreover he relates his knowledge about the General Theory to be something which was divinely inspired as he started playing on the piano.

I learnt that later, Einstein was greatly influenced by Spinoza’s philosophy that God has to be utterly immutable. Yet, Spinoza has been claimed by many agnostics/atheists as their own, as his philosophy that if there is a God he is not only impersonal unlike the Judeo-Christian God, he is also unknowable.

It made me reflect a lot of my interactions with S, a dear friend whom I’ve gotten to know recently. I think it would be fair to say that S. is my first atheist friend, a choice she made in her twenties despite growing up in a country with very strong Catholic traditions. As a professor in developmental psychology, in fact her research revolves, interestingly, around how children place their trust in adult testimony. So for example, how do children grow to believe that there are such things as germs and viruses, since these entities are not visible, and cannot be sensed by our five senses?

Because every time they pick food off the floor to pop into their mouths, you can hear an adult scream “Don’t do that, it’s dirty!” or “There are germs on the floor and they will make you sick!” From a psychological viewpoint, you can see that it is the testimony of a close adult – a parent, a caregiver, whose input is trusted and that adopted as truths by the child. Yes, germs exist because my mommy says that is what makes me sick.

For that reason, S. hypothesized that children’s belief in a supernatural entity, such as God, is also a product of two things: first, a developmental need to explain things (this comes much later into their childhood/adolescence), and second, adult input. Without the latter, an cross-sectional study (Harris) in the US had found that as children grew older, their belief in God also faded.

I’m not sure if God brought S. to my life for a reason, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Did I do enough to persuade her to reexamine her faith, or lack of? I know we had many many interesting discussions about this topic, as it is so close to our hearts for different reasons, but they were all intellectual and I wondered if I could have engaged her more deeply as to how it might apply in other ways.

Finding out about S’s work started me thinking about my own beliefs in how children grow, and whether it is really true that “God” is a construct children and trusted adults jointly create.

I looked at my own childhood, and tried to remember how I began wondering about God, and found myself coming to a different conclusion.

At around ages 5, in the average human development, children reach a stage of development that psychologists term as having “Theory of Mind”. That is, the child begins to realize that other people’s mental states may be different from their own. Simply put, they begin to be able to “put themselves in other people’s shoes”.

I remember being either 7 or 8, at an age when I indulged in many childish cruelties such as chasing after lizards and grabbing their tails just so that I could see the tails come off, or just crushing the ants running across the table.

One day, as I was fooling around with one such poor ant, I suddenly had that “Theory of Mind” moment. This poor ant, I suddenly thought. If I were the ant, I really would not realize that these probably were the last few minutes of my life. And then, I looked up at the sky, and thought – I wonder if I really am just an ant to something far greater than I am?

That thought troubled me so greatly it made me think about other things: the end of life being death, when did I begin existing and how is it I can’t remember what it was like to be born? It wasn’t long before I felt certain that there was Being who has knowledge and control over all of my fears and questions, although at that point I wasn’t sure who this God was. At the same time, in that small moment of epiphany, I felt this Being watching over me, and being personally interested in all these thoughts that were passing through my mind.

To make my story complete, I need to explain that my parents never pressured me one way or the other, and I can’t recall for the life of me if I had received the “close adult’s testimony” that S. talks about. But I felt certain that the only way I could cope with thinking about death, and not existing anymore one day, was to believe.

I didn’t come to the faith until I was 14, but looking back, I think the journey began in childhood. To say that children are more naturally inclined towards agnosticism, if left to their own devices, ignores their crucial and very much intrinsic need for children to understand where they began, and how their lives are finite, and what that means.

But then again, in a family that never talks about such questions, would these questions naturally arise? I think so. I’m not sure. There is a limit to how much rational talk is needed to make sense of things that surpass the mundane.

What I am certain of, is that although Dylan will need to make up his own mind about whether he wants Jesus in his heart, as his parents E. and I have the responsibility to allow these questions to arise, and to allow God’s holy spirit to answer the deepest of these questions – who he is in God’s eyes, the destiny that is uniquely created for him if he accepts his identity in Christ.