[Spartacus]

Children are "born believers" in God and do not simply acquire religious beliefs through indoctrination, according to an academic.

Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.

He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God.

"The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children's minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God."

In a lecture to be given at the University of Cambridge's Faraday Institute on Tuesday, Dr Barrett will cite psychological experiments carried out on children that he says show they instinctively believe that almost everything has been designed with a specific purpose.In one study, six and seven-year-olds who were asked why the first bird existed replied "to make nice music" and "because it makes the world look nice".

Another experiment on 12-month-old babies suggested that they were surprised by a film in which a rolling ball apparently created a neat stack of blocks from a disordered heap. Dr Barrett said there is evidence that even by the age of four, children understand that although some objects are made by humans, the natural world is different. He added that this means children are more likely to believe in creationism rather than evolution, despite what they may be told by parents or teachers. Dr Barrett claimed anthropologists have found that in some cultures children believe in God even when religious teachings are withheld from them.

"Children's normally and naturally developing minds make them prone to believe in divine creation and intelligent design. In contrast, evolution is unnatural for human minds; relatively difficult to believe."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion...c.facebook


Edit: made it easier to read. I uploaded the original content from my phone while i was at work.

[naive]

I reject this study, it seems heavily biased. 12 month year olds reacting to a fancy ball means they believe god? Yeah right. Six year olds aren't already indoctrinated in religion? Yeah right. To top it off, the questions are loaded. Asking a six year old "Why did the first bird exist" implies that there is in fact a known reason, and they want to get it "right" so they make one up. If they are creative and simply list a reason that they like birds, you can't say that it is proof of their belief in intelligent design because they listed a positive trait about something. All it means is they like birds singing, and have said the reason in which they like birds presuming that if birds had a reason to exist (implied in the question), it would be a positive one they enjoy. 


Also, presuming the infant ball trick wasn't just a bullshit study, lets think about what it would really mean. It has shown that if you create a complex man made system, and show it to an ignorant enough subject, they will believe it was god. If I were to agree to the results of this part of the study even, it seems like it would be giving even more credibility to the argument that people falsely believe in "creationism" and simply revert to such an argument once any system becomes sufficiently complex.

The way kids attribute purpose and usefulness to inanimate objects/other animals might also have something to do with the idea that children below a certain age are not able to imagine/view things from a perspective other than their own, or in other words: they can't truly put themselves "in someone else's shoes". So from their perspective things like rocks, or birds, have to have a purpose/usefulness that is directly/personally connected to them in some way. Those are my own thoughts though.

I think naive rightly pointed out some problems with the method of questioning, and also some issues with the conclusions of the study. But I also think there is in fact something of worth when it comes to the overall topic addressed in the study.

After reading Spartacus' article, I was reminded of a section contained within Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion.  The following quotations are taken from his book, and will likely be a good read for those interested:

Bloom suggests that we are innately predisposed to be creationists. Natural selection 'makes no intuitive sense'. Children are especially likely to assign purpose to everything, as the psychologist Deborah Keleman tells us in her article 'Are children "intuitive theists"? Clouds are 'for raining'. Pointy rocks are 'so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy'. The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has offered a helpful three-way classification of the 'stances' that we adopt in trying to understand and hence predict the behaviour of entities such as animals, machines or each other. They are 1. The physical stance, 2. The design stance and 3. The intentional stance.

1. The physical stance always works in principle, because everything ultimately obeys the laws of physics. But working things out using the physical stance can be very slow. By the time we have sat down to calculate all the interactions of a complicated object's moving parts, our prediction of its behaviour will probably be too late.

2. For an object that really is designed, like a washing machine or a crossbow, the design stance is an economical short cut. We can guess how the object will behave by going over the head of physics and appealing directly to design. As Dennett says, almost anyone can predict when an alarm clock will sound on the basis of the most casual inspection of its exterior. One does not know or care to know whether it is spring wound, battery driven, sunlight powered, made of brass wheels and jewel bearings or silicon chips - one just assumes that it is designed so that the alarm will sound when it is set to sound. Living things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to understanding the heart if we assume that it is 'designed' to pump blood. Karl von Frisch was led to investigate colour vision in bees (in the face of orthodox opinion that they were colour-blind) because he assumed that the bright colours of flowers were 'designed' to attract them. The quotation marks are designed to scare off mendacious creationists who might otherwise claim the great Austrian zoologist as one of their own. Needless to say, he was perfectly capable of translating the design stance into proper Darwinian terms.

3. The intentional stance is another short cut, and it goes one better than the design stance. An entity is assumed not merely to be designed for a purpose but to be, or contain, an agent with intentions that guide its actions. When you see a tiger, you had better not delay your prediction of its probable behaviour. Never mind the physics of its molecules, and never mind the design of its limbs, claws and teeth. That cat intends to eat you, and it will deploy its limbs, claws and teeth in flexible and resourceful ways to carry out its intention. The quickest way to second-guess its behaviour is to forget physics and physiology and cut to the intentional chase. Note that, just as the design stance works even for things that were not actually designed as well as things that were, so the intentional stance works for things that don't have deliberate conscious intentions as well as things that do. It seems to me entirely plausible that the intentional stance has survival value as a brain mechanism that speeds up decision making in dangerous circumstances, and in crucial social situations.

the intentional stance, like the design stance, saves time that might be vital to survival. Consequently, natural selection shaped brains to deploy the intentional stance as a short cut. We are biologically programmed to impute intentions to entities whose behaviour matters to us. Once again, Paul Bloom quotes experimental evidence that children are especially likely to adopt the intentional stance. When small babies see an object apparently following another object (for example, on a computer screen), they assume that they are witnessing an active chase by an intentional agent, and they demonstrate the fact by registering surprise when the putative agent fails to pursue the chase. The design stance and the intentional stance are useful brain mechanisms, important for speeding up the second-guessing of entities that really matter for survival, such as predators or potential mates. But, like other brain mechanisms, these stances can misfire.

Children, and primitive peoples, impute intentions to the weather, to waves and currents, to falling rocks. All of us are prone to do the same thing with machines, especially when they let us down. Many will remember with affection the day Basil Fawlty's car broke down during his vital mission to save Gourmet Night from disaster. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, then got out of the car, seized a tree branch and thrashed it to within an inch of its life. Most of us have been there, at least momentarily, with a computer if not with a car. Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harbouring savage resentment against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain. There was a poignant recent report of a man who tripped over his untied shoelace in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, fell down the stairs, and smashed three priceless Qing Dynasty vases: 'He landed in the middle of the vases and they splintered into a million pieces. He was still sitting there stunned when staff appeared. Everyone stood around in silence, as if in shock. The man kept pointing to his shoelace, saying, "There it is; that's the culprit."

[Spartacus]

Wiki-ed the guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_L._Barrett"

I'd still like to read his study if anyone manages to find it though. I don't think it is as simple as they way it was portrayed.

[pTK]

God is mighty.

[naive]

I will give him that the human mind may be wired to believe in "intelligent design", but that is a side effect of possessing the intellect to use tools, build things, etc. Once you posses the intellect to apply and adapt purpose to some things, it's pretty easy to extrapolate such systems onto literally anything. To me it is more readily explainable by evolution than intelligent design. If we were intelligently designed to intuitively believe in god, there would be little debate about the subject. To have such diversity in opinion seems like a pretty poor intelligently designed system if gods intent is "intuitive knowledge of god" like the study claims.  If we were "intelligently designed", why would god have chosen such a poor design? Humans are pretty evil, fragile, and violent beings. Most of religion is about denying basic primal instinct, why would god have intelligently designed us in a manner that would simply piss him off?