Beliefs about Origins and Eternal Life: How Easy Is Formal Religious Theory Development?

ABSTRACT

Two studies investigated children’s and their parents’ reasoning about their mental and bodily states during the time prior to biological conception–“preexistence.” Prior research has suggested that, in the absence of a religious script, children display untutored intuitions that they existed as largely disembodied emotional beings during preexistence. This research explored whether children who are being taught a formal theological doctrine about preexistence initially display similar default intuitive tendencies and whether these facilitate acquisition of the specific formal religious doctrine that they are learning. Adult (N = 38) and 7-to 12-year-old (N = 59) members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints judged whether their mental and bodily capacities functioned during preexistence. Results showed that by 11-to 12-years of age, children’s responses increasingly aligned with their parents’ doctrinally-accurate beliefs that they had a full range of mental states (i.e., epistemic, emotions, desires) and certain bodily capacities (i.e., perceptual, external body parts) during preexistence. However, at all ages, children deviated from their parents’ theologically-correct views, with children showing greatest consistency in privileging emotions as the continuous core of personhood. Findings converge with afterlife research to support conclusions that, across cultures, children are “intuitive eternalists” about psychological states. However, their intuitive tendencies also act as constraints on formal religious theory-building by primarily expediting the acquisition of those aspects of religious doctrine that are intuition-consistent not the doctrine as a whole. The process of becoming theologically correct therefore takes time and effort suggesting parallels to the process of acquiring formal scientific accuracy.

Acknowledgments

We deeply thank all of the parent and child members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who participated in these studies. In particular, we wish to thank Dr. Robert Pritt whose help made the completion of this research possible. We are also very grateful to Emma Pitt for her assistance with analyses and manuscript preparation. Finally, this paper extends research presented as part of the Presidential Symposium of the 2019 Meeting of the Cognitive Development Society. Many thanks to Paul Harris for organizing the symposium and to fellow presenters, Kathleen Corriveau, Larisa Heiphetz, and Jon Lane, for their presentations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Method note: The focus was on 7- to 12-year-olds because younger children were not found to understand the distinction between the prelife and pregnancy periods (see Emmons & Kelemen, 2014, 2015). Note also that classification of bodily versus mental capacities followed Bering and Bjorklund (2004) but across the afterlife literature there are differences between studies in what qualifies as a bodily capacity–which in addition to the use of different age groups across studies–has complicated the interpretive and developmental picture (see Lane et al., 2016).

² Lack of memory for premortal life once on Earth is the reason why LDS Church members must draw on LDS scriptures and other spiritual guides (e.g. Holy Ghost, Jesus) to make correct life choices that will lead them to Salvation and thus back to Heavenly Father after death. Ultimately, correct life choices on Earth have the additional outcome that they can lead to the possession of a material rather than a spiritual body in the afterlife. Attainment of an eternal material physical existence brings an individual closer to the ideal state of Heavenly Father who already possesses an eternal material body. Indeed, it is Heavenly Father’s material body that provides the template to the spiritual physical form (including eyes, nose etc.) of each person during preexistence.

³ Shuar and Ecuadorian children also generated justifications similar to this one. When offered by those samples of children, this kind of justification would seem to have no obvious religious content. However, when uttered by an LDS child, the term “supposed” potentially alludes to an aspect of the Plan of Salvation.

⁴ In fact, the high number of uncodeable ambiguous/irrelevant answers generated by this sample suggested that children had enough awareness of, and anxiety about, doctrinal “right answers” that when answering general prelife capacity questions they were inclined to confabulate at the prospect of getting the answer “wrong” (see also Schachner, Zhu, Li, & Kelemen, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) [REC-1007984] and NSF [DRL-1561401] to Deb Kelemen.