Children’s God Representations: Are Anthropomorphic God Figures Only Human?

Abstract

In many religious traditions, anthropomorphism plays a central role in visual representations of the divine. As suggested by the notion of minimally counterintuitive properties (e.g., Boyer, Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture, New York, pp. 391–411, 1994), some peculiar ontological arrangements (e.g., ontological violations) tend to characterize religious representations. In the case of human-like God figures, such ontological peculiarities may consist of either: a combination of humanness and non-humanness (e.g., a human figure with wings), or a lack of central characteristics presenting qualities that are central to the human category (e.g., a face). The former corresponds to Guthrie’s (Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion, New York, 1993) observation of the recurrent sameness-otherness combination with the human being to depict the divine. Such conceptual arrangements may change across a child’s development. However, research on children’s God representations has systematically considered anthropomorphic figures as distinct from non-anthropomorphic ones. The current work proposes a revised developmental model that accounts for domain-specific properties used by children to signify the special position of God as compared to human beings. That model is particularly appropriate to consider God representations as depicted in children’s drawings.