The Origins of Religion in the Child

Abstract

Religion is here regarded as an externalized adaptation which serves both the individual and society. It is argued that the four major elements of institutional religionthe God concept, Scripture, worship, and theology-provide ready-made solutions to adaptive problems engendered by four cognitive need capacities-the search for conservation, representation, relation, and comprehension-which emerge in the course of mental growth. It is concluded that while religious elements such as the God concept may have arisen, in part at least, out of confrontations between cognitive need capacities and physical or social reality, the religious elements are nonetheless sui generis and are not reducible to the needs and the phenomena that produced them any more than these needs or phenomena are religious in themselves. Every social institution, whether it be science, art, or religion, can be regarded as an externalized adaptation which serves both the individual and society. From the point of view of the group, social institutions provide the ground rules and regulations which make society and social progress possible. Looked at from the standpoint of the individual, social institutions afford ready-made solutions to the inevitable conflicts with social and physical reality which the individual encounters in his march through life. Social institutions, therefore, originate and evolve out of the adaptive efforts of both society and the individual. It follows that any complete account of the origins of religion must deal both with individual and social processes of adaptation. In the present paper, I propose to treat the origins of religion solely from the perspective of the individual and not from that of society. It is not my intent, therefore, to give a comprehensive account of the origins of religion in general nor in any way to negate the central importance of social factors in the origination and historical evolution of religion. All that I hope to demonstrate is that religion has an individual as well as a social lineage and that this individual lineage can be traced to certain cognitive need capacities which emerge in the course of mental growth. To whatever extent religion derives from society's efforts to resolve the conflicts engendered by these individual need capacities, we are justified in speaking of the origins of religion in the child. Briefly stated, the paper will describe four cognitive need capacities with respect to the age at which they first make their appearance, the problems of adaptation which they engender, and the corresponding resolutions offered by religion. A concluding section will take up the question of the uniqueness of religious adaptations from the point of view of the individual. EMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE NEED CAPACITIES IN THE CHILD In describing the mental development of the child, this presentation will lean rather heavily upon the work of the