Children Believe There Is Morality Higher Than God (According To Science)
Do children have an innate moral sense?
The abstract for a study titled “Children deny that God could change morality” reads:
Can moral rules change? We tested 129 children from the United States to investigate their beliefs about whether God could change widely shared moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to call someone a mean name”), controversial moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to tell a small lie to help someone feel happy”), and physical propositions (e.g., “fire is hotter than snow”). We observed an emerging tendency to report that God's ability to change morality is limited, suggesting that children across development find some widely shared aspects of morality to be impossible to change.1
In other words, until the age of seven, children believe that God cannot change morality. This means that absent social conditioning or adult reasoning, humans innately feel that there is a moral order higher than a personal God.
This study is fascinating to me because one of the primary arguments for Christianity that C.S. Lewis describes in Mere Christianity is that all humans have an innate sense of right and wrong. He attributes this innate moral sense to God and claims it only makes sense if there is a moral order we are attuned to because we are made in God’s image. The idea that objective morality can only come from God has been a longstanding argument for theism.
However, this study suggests that humans’ innate moral sense is so strong that it trumps theism. One of the arguments of the New Atheist movement has been that the God of the Bible is cruel and demands evil from his followers.2 Theists respond that they have no basis to judge God. This study suggests that children as young as four believe that they do.
While some might not acknowledge their view because they are “just kids,” the Biblical texts suggest having “faith like a child,” implying that children’s theological perspective has merit. If someone believes humans were created by God, they must also believe that humans were created with this trait. At a minimum, it raises interesting questions. Why do children have an innate moral sense they believe even God cannot change?
Reinecke, Madeline G., and Larisa Heiphetz Solomon. “Children deny that god could change morality.” Cognitive Development, vol. 68, Oct. 2023, p. 101393, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101393.
If you want a full breakdown of this argument, read:
Barker, Dan. God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. Prometheus Books, 2023.