One night while chasing my five-year-old nephew at x0.33 speed—to give him the steady assurance of being faster than me—a branch broke off from an overhead tree and smacked the ground next to him.
He immediately hid behind an oak tree and donned a serious demeanor. I joined him in peering around the side of the trunk.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What was it?”
“I heard a noise.” He paused. “Do you see them?”
“See what?”
“The dinosaurs.”
I smiled and said I did. We spent the next 30 minutes crawling and ducking and covering from giant clandestine lizards roaming our Midwestern backyard.
My nephew’s automatic belief that something preternatural had caused the branch to fall wasn’t nonsense; it was actually a byproduct of the way his mind was supposed to work.
Research from cognitive scientist Justin Barrett shows that humans come into the world assuming there’s some kind of supernatural source behind everything. But while dinosaurs might get the credit every now and then, if you press a child, they’re far more likely to credit a divine source. As such, Barrett argues, we’re all more or less “born believers.” And this has a load of implications for us big kids too.
You might think, Well, sure, kids can think anything is real. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, for example. But regardless of how impressionable we think children are, they don’t accept everything they hear. No matter how hard you try to convince them that broccoli tastes good, for example, there’s a high probability they’ll hang on to their skepticism.
So it’s not that kids are merely naïve. It’s more that they’re naturally attuned to believe that things happen for a reason—and their go-to reason is typically related to something divine. This is one of the reasons children perpetually ask, “Why?” They spontaneously interpret events as if they’re a product of divine intelligence. The “Why?” helps piece together their slowly developing puzzle of reality.
If you ask preschoolers if raining is what a cloud “does” or if it’s “what a cloud was made for,” they’ll almost unanimously say the cloud was made for the sake of raining. Kids “view natural phenomena as intentionally designed by a god. Not coincidentally, they therefore view natural objects as existing for a purpose.”
In other words, it’s as if children assume there’s some kind of force out there that designs every little thing in our universe for a specific reason. Developmental psychologist Deborah Keleman thus argues that children are “intuitive theists.” It’s a theism so innate that even kids raised in overtly atheistic homes still tend to assume there’s a divine presence guiding their world.
While many cognitive scientists attribute this natural “God awareness” to evolutionary processes, theologians like John Calvin would insist it comes from the sensus divinitatis (“a sense of deity”). It’s the idea that all humans possess a nagging sense that there is some kind of god out there, and this divine radar holds up surprisingly well across cultures, time, and geography. Atheism is thus actually “not a battle just against culture, but against human nature,” in the words of evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson.
The more I learned about intuitive theism, the more I realized I could relate. I grew up assuming that God was real and that Jesus was a decent candidate for that God. But I threw those beliefs out the window when I turned 13, mainly because secular musicians swayed me to think Christianity was uncool. Then when I finally did accept Christ at 18, it felt like a return to the wonder of childhood—falling into a serene “second naïveté,” to borrow Paul Ricœur’s famous phrase.
Now, none of this research suggests that kids are born with a salvific comprehension of the Judeo-Christian YHWH, the Father of Jesus from whom the Spirit proceeds (John 15:26). It simply demonstrates that we’re not born atheists—at least, not functional atheists. Instead, atheism is something people are gradually formed toward, thanks to inundation within a culture where the doubting-Thomas mentality is treated as the intellectual standard.
If doubt is the norm, this makes it all the easier for our childlike sense of enchantment to dull as we get older. Many of us gradually replace wonder and mystery with mere logical conclusions to unmeaningful causations. It’s not necessarily a natural evolution; the scholar David Kling says it’s more like slowly unlearning, overriding, and suppressing our “default setting.”
Yet even though we can dull this default quite a bit, it doesn’t turn off completely. Surprisingly, the psychologist Jesse Bering found that even atheistic adults, when faced with events of enormous fortune or misfortune, will implicitly admit that “everything happens for a reason.”
I was skeptical about this anecdote the first time I heard it— probably because I myself have been a bit too conditioned toward the doubting-Thomas mentality. But the more I mulled it over, the more it made sense. When we’re confronted with something disastrous or remarkably fortuitous, it dials down our knee-jerk beliefs about a cold, random universe, even if it’s just momentary. Wonder in any form—positive or negative—can dislodge our stubborn opinions, granting a brief return to childlikeness.
All of this research, of course, brings to mind the way Jesus praised children throughout the Gospels.
And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them (Mark 10:13–16).
I’m sure Jesus wasn’t praising children on account of their flawless ethical sensibilities (spending an afternoon with a two-year-old will unveil this theological truism). Instead, as New Testament scholar William L. Lane notes, Jesus praises the children simply because they unabashedly accept Jesus’ reality without reservation.
Jesus blesses the children not on account of “their virtues, but for what they lack,” argues scholar James R. Edwards. Young kids lack sophistication, self-consciousness, and anxiety over fitting in or aligning with majority opinion. They haven’t developed a sense of self-importance, the desire to feel like the smartest in the room, or the illusion of control over an unpredictable universe.
All to say, Jesus’ praise may have partly been aimed at the way a child’s brain is perfectly poised to shamelessly draw toward the wonder of the kingdom.
Even though adulthood and rationalism and the scientific method might bend us to see the world as less theistically designed, as followers of Jesus we know that these methods can’t unveil the fullness of reality as it really is. Jesus’ invitation to children is an invitation to adults too. It’s an invitation to remove the guardrails that prevent our minds from noticing God behind everything—even a fallen branch.
It’s tempting to assume there’s a loss of spirituality among today’s younger generations. But a recent study from The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion found that“nones” (those who don’t identify with any religion) don’t have any less spiritual longings than those who attend church. They just tend to channel those longings into different avenues, preferring “personalized means of discovery to those offered by traditional religions.”
In other words, the awareness of God, the sensus divinitatis,is alive and well today. The younger generations just might need some help pointing it in the right direction.
And even for those who have been faithfully attending church for years, there’s always a need to fall back into the wonder of a second naïveté—to become and see the world like children once again, reminded of the beauty of life with God in a fresh way.
A few weeks ago, our friends came over and brought their kids. Their family had gotten in a (relatively minor) car crash recently, so I asked their four-year-old about it. “God protected us” is all she volunteered before going back to playing.
I admire that response a lot. I probably would’ve taken a beat to acknowledge the factors like seat belts and airbags that led to their safety before announcing the God conclusion. Maybe I have a lot to learn from her.
Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen. He writes most frequently on Substack.
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