How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [41]
Interestingly, no researcher has collected data on what adults render when asked to draw a picture of God. When we did, it provided fascinating evidence about the neurological “evolution” of religious imagery in the minds of believers and disbelievers. The evidence even suggests that atheists contemplate God with as much depth and sincerity as a religiously committed believer. But before we address how adults envision God, let's take a look at the children's research.
A CHILD'S IMAGE OF GOD
Four major studies have analyzed children's pictures of God.7 The first was conducted in 1944 by the American sociologist Ernest Harms, who amassed 4,000 pictures from children between the ages of three and eighteen. In 1980 the German religious educator Hermann Siegenthaler collected 350 pictures from children five to sixteen years of age. And in 1996, Helmut Hanisch, a professor of religious education at the University of Leipzig, gathered more than 2,500 pictures from children aged seven to sixteen. A fourth study, conducted in 1998 by three American university professors, analyzed 968 drawings made by children between the ages of three and eighteen.
Each researcher used somewhat subjective criteria to analyze the pictures, but together, certain common themes emerged that corresponded to the child's age and the religious affiliation of their parents and teachers. For example, children below the age of six usually drew faces, while children between the ages of six and ten mostly drew faces and people. God was seen as a protector or a king, sometimes living in a palace or in the clouds. Occasionally, angels or biblical scenes would be depicted, but as children grew older, faces and people were replaced by more symbolic images such as crosses, hearts, open hands, or an eye hovering in the sky. The oldest children often represented God as the sun or as radiating spirals and light. In all studies, the use of symbols increased with age.
Hanisch took the research to another level. He gathered 1,471 pictures from West German children who attended Christian-oriented schools. Then he collected 1,187 drawings from children who attended schools in East Germany, where an official antireligious doctrine had governed the country.
In the religious group, children between the ages of seven and nine represented God as a face or person more than 90 percent of the time, but as we saw in the earlier studies, there was a gradual decline as the children grew older. By the time they reached sixteen, only 20 percent drew pictures of faces or people. Instead, they preferred symbols like suns, circles, and spirals. Commentaries from the older children reflected a loving perception of God.
This did not happen in the artwork collected from the nonreligious students. By age sixteen, 80 percent of the nonreligious children still used people to symbolize God. Their comments were generally negative, referring to God as powerless and weak, and often included references to war, misery, suffering, and poverty. As one twelve-year-old girl wrote, “I don't understand why God is allowing all this. Therefore I don't believe in God.”
Drawings of God from a seven-year-old girl (left) and a fourteen-year-old boy (right). Both children attended Sunday school.
As religious children grow older, their depictions of God become more abstract, reaching 80 percent by the age of sixteen. Only 20 percent of the pictures drawn by older non-religious children were abstract; 80 percent remained anthropomorphic. (Chart modified after Hanisch.)
IMAGINING GOD
Young children do not have the cognitive skills to articulate abstract concepts of God, but they can use their visual imagination to comprehend spiritual realms. Even in the adult brain, ideas appear to be associated with internal visual processes, and mathematicians often think in pictures when they describe the invisible forces of the universe. Even when we imagine the distant past or future events, we activate the visual-spatial circuits in the brain.8 In fact, if you cannot see, hear, touch, taste,