Developmental psychology adds an important piece to the picture: spiritual questions are not only old and widespread across cultures; they also arise spontaneously in individual development. Children start asking about origin, death, purpose, and reality long before they can fully grasp religious doctrines or philosophical arguments, which suggests that spirituality grows out of how human minds mature, not only out of what cultures teach.
Even in non‑religious or minimally religious homes, young children ask questions like “Where was I before I was born?”, “What happens when we die?”, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, or “Who made the world?” without being prompted. They also invent their own explanations—imagining invisible beings, alternative worlds, or forms of continuity—sometimes going beyond or against what adults tell them. These early questions are not just curiosity about facts; they reach into meaning, origin, and continuation, precisely the territory this guide calls spiritual. The questions emerge from the child’s growing capacity for imagination, time, causality, and self‑awareness, which means they are tied to basic cognitive development rather than to any particular religious curriculum.
Psychological research on “theory of mind” and “counterfactual thinking” helps explain why this happens. As children learn that other people have minds, intentions, and perspectives, they also begin to imagine agents and causes they cannot see. As they acquire the ability to think about “what could have happened instead,” they start to wonder why things are the way they are, and whether they might have been otherwise. Spiritual questions—about why there is a world at all, why they themselves exist, and whether anything comes after death—are natural extensions of these capacities. They are not exotic; they are what you get when a human brain begins to think beyond immediate here‑and‑now survival.
Alongside this expanding imagination, children (and adults) show a pronounced discomfort with open‑ended uncertainty. Psychologists call this the need for cognitive closure: a preference for firm answers over ambiguity, especially in domains that feel important or threatening. Death, fairness, purpose, and the structure of the world are exactly the kinds of domains where ambiguity is hardest to bear. Faced with unanswered spiritual questions, people experience tension and often adopt the first coherent framework that promises relief, whether that is a religious doctrine, a philosophical stance, or a scientific worldview taken as complete. In this sense, spirituality shows up as both the discomfort with not knowing and the drive to find some kind of orientation, even if that orientation is “I accept that we do not know.”
Different environments shape how this drive is expressed. A child growing up in a religious community will likely have their questions answered with religious narratives and practices; a child in a secular home might hear naturalistic explanations or “we don’t know, but we can wonder about it together.” The content of the answers differs, but the deeper pattern is the same: big questions arise, adults respond with frameworks, and the child learns to locate themselves inside some story about reality. This is why spirituality, understood as question‑asking and meaning‑seeking, persists even when people later reject the specific answers they were given. You can walk away from a religion; you cannot walk away from having a mind that notices mortality, asks about meaning, and feels the need to orient itself.
For a secular guide, this has two key implications. First, it undercuts the idea that spirituality is something religions “add” to otherwise neutral humans. Instead, spirituality looks like part of normal development: as our cognitive capacities grow, we naturally begin to think in spiritual terms, whether or not anyone calls it that. Second, it shows why simply dropping religious belief does not resolve spiritual questions. The questions came first; religion was one set of answers. If you leave those answers behind but still want to live honestly with the questions your own mind continues to generate, you have to find new, naturalistic ways to engage them. That is exactly where secular spirituality begins.