Psychological development is not something self-evidently natural but a partly human creation, emerging contingently from the midstream of human history. Modern developmental psychology is a continuing outgrowth of the religious outlook. Christian ways of thinking have become psychological ones, and they share a common underlying metaphysic; philosophers writing about time such as Heidegger and Ricoeur spring from this same tradition. The so-called predestination of souls from before birth (saved or damned) by divine determinism transitioned into pre-natal biological determinism of cognitive ability and disability. The theory of developmental stages – today (for example) the arrival of ‘logical reasoning’ or ‘empathy’ in the child – emerged from theories about the arrival of saving grace in the individual.

The chain of being depicted creation as a linear hierachy of living forms from the simplest up to the human. In the eighteenth century it was 'temporalized' to give a model for the history of life on earth implying that humanity was the last and highest product of the creative process. This image of development was boosted by a comparison with the growth of the embryo to maturity. Early theories of evolution continued to present the process as an ascent towards humanity as its goal. Parallels were drawn with the goal-directed process of embryological development, implying that the embryo recapitulates the history of life on earth. Even when naturalists realized that evolution was best represented as a branching tree rather than a ladder, the tree was given a central trunk pointing toward humanity, all other developments being mere side-branches. The claim that humanity is the goal of creation survived in various non-Darwinian theories of evolution in the late nineteenth century.