DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i01.012

Pages: 79-97

The present paper is based on the research study that envisaged exploring and understanding the children’s conception of God in Indian context. The study of the related literature in this area presented various schools of thought supporting as well as challenging children’s abilitiy to think abstractly. It also clearly revealed that most studies were conducted on the Judeo-Christian children and established that there was an ongoing debate around the influence of culture on the children’s conception of God. There were found two different opinions about children’s conception of God. On one side, preadolescent children were said to possess an anthropomorphic and material understanding of God, whereas another school of scholars opined that children could represent non human and abstract concept of God and they should not be constrained to be anthropomorphic only. The present study conducted in Indian context showed that children were able to think about God as an abstract concept through their everyday experiences . These everyday experiences of the children could be planned to engage them in philosophical abstract thinking from the very beginning by leaving space for them for questioning and thinking for themselves. It showed that children’s conception of God gets influenced by the processes of primary and secondary socialization . At the same time the study showed that children’s reasoning, imagination, curiosity and inquisitiveness is unquestionable and children should be provided proper opportunities to enhance and develop them.