ABSTRACT
The natural scientist tries to understand the world of nature by formulating laws, which are not the immutable forces many nonscientific laymen think them to be, but are more in the form of hypotheses advanced to account for as many of the facts as possible. A sequence of concepts in three stages could be seen from the children's answers. The first is crudely materialistic, where God intervenes by changing, manipulating or constructing the bush in a special way as a means of attracting Moses’ attention or playing ‘pretend’ in some childish way. The second stage for most children from about nine years onwards, is a period of intermediate thinking in the sense that semi-physical explanations are used. There is no doubt in most of the pupils’ minds that Jesus had the power, conferred by God as the creator, to change the stone into bread.
