Super-power, super-knowledge and super-perception seem to be the starting assumption. Experimental evidence, including cross-cultural studies, suggests that three-year-olds attribute super, god-like qualities to lots of different beings. Margaret Evans found that children younger than ten preferred creationist explanations of animals to evolutionary ones, even when their parents and teachers taught them evolution.
Furthermore, recent research by psychologists suggests that children are predisposed to think that minds can exist without physical bodies and survive physical death.īarrett further argues that there are additional factors disposing to belief in an all knowing creator. Our tendency to suspect agency and purpose makes belief in invisible agents plausible, and this feeds in to the human bias to spread stories and beliefs about agents that are intuitive enough to fit well with our mental tools and intuitions about agents but unusual enough to be interesting and significant. Experimental subjects observing geometrical shapes moving around a computer screen spontaneously describe such movements in terms of purpose: one shape is “chasing” another, and so on. We see “faces in the clouds”, we perceive a rock as a bear, and instantly fear that the bump in the night is an intruder or a ghost. Belief in gods and spirits fits well with these automatic biases and intuitions, and belief in an all-knowing, creator God fits even better.īarrett argues that belief in gods plausibly has its roots in our tendency to detect agency and purpose even when it isn’t there, (the Hypersensitive Agent Detector Device or HADD). Most of what we believe is grounded in mental tools that rapidly and intuitively generate beliefs about our environment.
Using experimental results in the relatively new field of cognitive psychology of religion, Justin Barrett argues convincingly that children are not uniformly gullible, but rather are biased towards religious belief.
Influential figures like Richard Dawkins can give the impression that belief in God arises from a general childhood gullibility and indoctrination. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (AltaMira Press, 2004) Articles, Briefing Sheets & Book Reviews.
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