How Do Children Think about God?

How do children think about God? This question was raised by Ronald Goldman in 1964 in Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence.

The answer to this question cannot be found in religious texts, but rather tested from psychological research on how children think about divine activity. In short, Goldman then compiled research on how divine experiences take place in children's minds.

Goldman borrowed Jean Piaget's concept of Child Development, which divides children into 3 age levels with different cognitive abilities. Referring to the part on the development of operational thinking about religion, Goldman presented a questionnaire, compiled from a Christian theological scale, related to three images and three stories from the Bible. Assuming that the difference in children's ages characterizes the difference in their cognitive abilities to understand the world, this also characterizes the difference in how they think about God.

"Religious thinking", as Goldman formulated it, is more or less a process of generalizing various experiences, perceptions and existing concepts into interpretations of divine activity and nature.