There’s nothing too new about this, but here via the London Times is yet more reinforcement for those of us who believe that the religious impulse is innate. Various scientists are cited, so read the whole piece, but this is, perhaps, worth noting in particular:
Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, believes the picture is more complex. “Our research shows children have a natural, intuitive way of reasoning that leads them to all kinds of supernatural beliefs about how the world works,” he said.
“As they grow up they overlay these beliefs with more rational approaches but the tendency to illogical supernatural beliefs remains as religion.”
Hood, who will present his findings at the British Science Association’s annual meeting this week, sees organised religion as just part of a spectrum of supernatural beliefs. In one study he found even ardent atheists balked at the idea of accepting an organ transplant from a murderer, because of a superstitious belief that an individual’s personality could be stored in their organs. “This shows how superstition is hardwired into our brains,” he said.
[snip]
Professor Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington University and author of Religion Explained, supports Hood’s view that the origins of religion may lie in common childhood experiences. In a recent article in Nature, the science journal, he said: “From childhood, humans form enduring and important social relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen heroes and fantasised mates.“It is a small step from this to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible.” Boyer holds out little hope for atheism. “Religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems,” he said. “By contrast, disbelief is generally the work of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.”
Fair enough, I think, and, I would reckon, yet more support for the idea that is better to channel the religious impulse by, as I argued here before, giving children some sort of gentle religious grounding, preferably in a well-established, undemanding, culturally useful (understanding all that art and so on) and mildly (small c) conservative denomination that doesn’t dwell too much on the supernatural and keeps both ritual and philosophical speculation in their proper place.”
Once again: better vicar than wicca….
“Better vicar than wicca.” Well said. I usually don’t comment just to say I agree (waste of bandwidth), but, well, I agree with your conclusion, which is supported by this fact and (as you imply) lots of other reasons as well. I probably have more tolerance than you for the “supernatural” (disenchantment is boring), but you’ve given a nice little functionalist atheist defense of traditional religion.
“In one study he found even ardent atheists balked at the idea of accepting an organ transplant from a murderer”
Wow, that really surprises me. I’d be curious to see the statistics on that, and also whether the atheists were self-identified or determined by answering a series of questions about their beliefs. Since the latter is more likely to pick out the “real” atheists, rather than the ones who are simply non-churchgoers.
Do we have to steer children down a religious path to encourage their natural imagination and curiosity? It seems like this has two seriously negative downsides: (1) it’s going to be awfully hard on kids to get one story at school and a different story at home; “Mommy and Daddy don’t believe in God” is not going to go over well at any religious institution, even conservative with a small c, and (2) it seems like that time could be better spent studying nature and art and playing astronauts and aliens and such, which would satisfy the imagination and avoid the need for a bunch of lying.
This doesn’t seem that different a claim from Atran or others. That is we have cognitive mechanisms which will assign false positives to various things like agency detection. It’s nature to then construct narratives to explain such false positives. While one would expect this more in children, it’s probably just because they haven’t learned to be as skeptical as adults by recognizing their intuitions are often wrong.
I’m not sure one should suggest religion develops out of childhood though. Rather I suspect that in the typical pre-modern environment you simply don’t have the diversity of experience to be as critical a thinker as in the modern world. That is you don’t have the social structures to investigate (which largely arise in the modern era and arguably still haven’t affected most of society) but you also don’t have the experiences to call into question without investigation your initial judgments. So long as the initial judgments have explanatory power and don’t fail in obvious ways you maintain them and they enter into the communial memory as a standard narrative.
I’m not sure why one needs suggest more than this.
Oh, this is the stuff of genius.
Since all humans have a streak of sadism in them, why not encourage a little bit of torture?
And why not legalize rape, after all isn’t in better to rape than to murder?
PS If religion is innate, how come there are atheists at all?
I encourage you to think about that.