Approaching an Understanding of Omniscience from the Preschool Years to Early Adulthood.

Individuals worldwide believe in beings with extraordinary mental capacities. An omniscient, or all-knowing, God is embedded in the belief systems of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Armstrong, 1993); in Buddhism, which holds that Guatama Buddha achieved an ‘enlightened’ state in which he possessed extraordinary knowledge (Pyysiainen, 2003); and in Hinduism, which holds that Vishnu is omniscient (Kumar, 1998). Not only are concepts of omniscient beings found in the most widespread religions, “omni” qualities, such as omniscience, are central to many individuals’ personal conceptualizations of a God (e.g., Barrett, 1998; Noffke & McFadden, 2001; Spilka, Armatas, & Nussbaum, 1964). Although such ideas are widely endorsed, they may be particularly difficult for us to fully cognitively represent because they do not accord with our everyday intuitions about human minds that are fallible, subject to ignorance and misperceptions. In the current studies we investigate how children and adults come to represent omniscient beings. These studies help reveal how we come to conceptualize counterintuitive ideas, and shed light on the ontogeny and flexibility of our everyday theory of mind. In contrast to ordinary sentience, “omniscience” refers to knowing everything. Christian and Jewish scripture “declares that God’s eyes run everywhere…He searches all hearts and observes everyone’s ways…in other words, he knows everything about everything and everybody all the time. Also, he knows the future no less than the past and the present….all his knowledge is always immediately and directly before his mind” (Packer, 1993, pp. 31-32). Similarly, the Qur’an proclaims that, “Allah knows whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth…Verily, Allah is the All-Knower of everything” (Surah Mujadila, 58: 7). Such a mind is radically different from the fallible human minds with which we interact on a daily basis. A seminal study with college students sheds light on how adults cognitively represent such a mind (Barrett & Keil, 1996). A particular focus was the discursiveness of God’s knowledge; God “sees all things not piecemeal or one at a time…he sees them all at once” (St. Augustine cited in Aquinas, 1265-1274/2006, p. 180). When asked directly, participants—whose religious backgrounds included Baha’ism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism—overwhelmingly endowed God with omniscience, reporting that God “can read minds” and “knows everything.” Then, participants read scenarios in which God faced simultaneous demands, such as a boy who prayed to God for help while God attended to someone else’s prayers. When asked whether various statements were true of God (e.g., “God had just finished answering another prayer when God helped the boy”), participants often responded in the affirmative, suggesting that they defaulted to thinking of God as mentally constrained (i.e., God becomes aware of and responds to prayers sequentially). Moreover, when asked to paraphrase such narratives, they often referred to God as having human-like mental and spatiotemporal constraints. (See Barrett, 1998, for similar results from Hindu participants who reasoned about Vishnu.) Thus, although adults may report believing in God’s total omniscience, in their everyday reasoning, they easily default to thinking of God as possessing a powerful yet limited, human-like mind. Our research focuses on the development of such notions in childhood. Some theorists have argued that children are “prepared” to represent and believe in omniscient or mentally-infallible beings; so, to represent these ideas later in development merely requires that children retain these intuitive ideas into adulthood (e.g., Barrett & Richert, 2003; Richert & Barrett, 2005). Empirically, this preparedness position was inspired by research demonstrating that 3-year-olds over-attribute certain knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the contents of closed boxes) to ordinary people and to God (e.g., Barrett et al., 2001; Wellman & Bartsch, 1988), and that 5-year-olds attribute this privileged knowledge to God but not to ordinary people (Barrett et al., 2001). Thus, Barrett and Richert surmised that, “on many properties, young children seem equipped with default assumptions that better match theological descriptions of God than adult conceptions of people. Three-year-olds assume beliefs and percepts are infallible” (2003, p. 309). In contrast, theorists who advocate an “anthropomorphism” perspective propose that young children have particular difficulty understanding extraordinary mental capacities and tend to conceive of even extraordinary agents’ minds as human-like (Gimenez-Dasi & Harris, 2005; Kiessling & Perner, 2014; Lane, Wellman, & Evans, 2010, 2012; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007). As their ideas mature, children increasingly appreciate omniscience, although, as just discussed, even adults may fall short of a full understanding. Whereas proponents of the preparedness hypothesis take 3-year-olds’ over-attribution of knowledge to people (on classic theory-of-mind tasks) as evidence that they understand mental infallibility, proponents of the anthropomorphism perspective argue that 3-year-olds do not attribute extraordinary or infallible knowledge in these studies, but, instead, they are often focused on reality or on their own knowledge and viewpoint (e.g., Lane et al., 2010, 2012; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007). Aside from their differing interpretations of early development, both of these positions—anthropomorphism and preparedness—concur that by about 5-years, children can distinguish between the enhanced, less limited knowledge of God and the more fallible, more limited knowledge of ordinary humans (e.g., Gimenez-Dasi, Guerrero, & Harris, 2005; Knight, Sousa, Barrett, & Atran, 2004; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007). Moreover, 5-year-olds easily attribute certain sorts of extraordinary knowledge to beings with exceptional perception and to novel beings whom they are taught “know everything” (Lane et al., 2010, 2012). A key question, however, concerns whether 5-year-olds’ attribution of privileged knowledge to God and to others reflects an attribution of anything like omniscience. Addressing this question could shed light on fundamentally contrasting positions within the cognitive science of religion, yet children’s full understanding of omniscience remains untested. In research thus far, 5-year-olds attribute knowledge of easily-accessible information about the here-and-now (e.g., knowledge of the contents of closed or darkened containers, which children themselves have seen) to God and other extraordinary beings, but such research falls far short of considering the scope of omniscient knowledge as outlined earlier—knowledge of everything about everything; not just ordinary information about the here-and-now, but additionally knowledge of the past and future, and everyone’s intents and behavior. Is conceptualizing this dramatically non-human capacity found early in childhood or does it emerge gradually over an extended developmental period? In the current studies, we assess preschoolers’, elementary-school children’s, and adults’ understanding of the breadth and depth of an all-knowing being’s knowledge. By “breadth”, we refer to the types or domains of knowledge that someone possesses; here we focus on an all-knowing agent’s knowledge of facts about the past, present, and future, as well as knowledge of others’ personal information (e.g., someone’s thoughts and preferences). These forms of knowledge are suitably broad for a consideration of omniscience. We also assess participants’ understanding of the “depth” of an all-knowing being’s knowledge within domains. An omniscient agent’s knowledge would be so deep that it would surpass even experts’ knowledge within their domains of expertise. Children’s understanding of expertise is well-researched, with prior studies indicating that preschoolers appreciate that experts know more than others about specific domains—for example, doctors know more about health than do mechanics (Lutz & Keil, 2002). To understand omniscience, children and adults must conceptualize a being who knows more about health than doctors and more about cars than mechanics. Thus, we assess whether children and adults understand the distinction between knowing a lot about a specific domain (i.e., being expert) and knowing everything about every domain (i.e., being omniscient). Given that religious beliefs, practices, and instruction vary across religions and cultures, a full account of the development of ideas of omniscience will require research in multiple settings. Here, we begin by examining these developments in a religiously-saturated culture—the United States. Over 90% of the U.S. public believes in a God (Pew Research Center, 2008) and they attend religious institutions more frequently than almost all other western societies (Bloom, 2012). Such cultural beliefs and messages may foster enhanced early ideas of omniscience. Previewing our results, however, we find early misunderstanding and prolonged difficulties in developing understandings of omniscience in the U.S.