ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 offers a tentative account of the steps that human beings may take when constructing the universally occurring concept of God and considers some of the reasons for its seemingly ragged path in later development. The discussion centres on the issue of conceptual innateness as currently understood in developmental neuroscience, which is informed by the cumulative research effort of developmental scholars and which has shed considerable light on what happens very early on in many areas of cognitive development. The chapter reiterates the point that the most likely origin of “religion” is in children’s causal understanding of the world as a whole, which in due course, however, comes to be influenced by culture, broadly speaking. Developmental research is the most appropriate existing tool for unravelling the mechanisms of this development and identifying the factors interacting with it throughout development. The chapter also acknowledges that the currently available methodology precludes systematic study of highly abstract ideas in pre-verbal children so that any attempts to understand the onset and initial form of the core theological concept are necessarily speculative.
