Children are born believers in God
All over propaganda pages of religious institutions you find
essays with a title suggesting a scientific study has revealed hitherto unknown
evidence for gods in human brains from childhood onward.
This, it turns out, is primitive Christian propaganda.
Dr Justin Barrett, who led the CRT project, the Cognition,
Religion and Theology Project.
He works at the Oxford Institute of Cognitive &
Evolutionary Anthropology or, more precisely at the Centre for Anthropology
& Mind, which already sounds a bit less impressive.
His opinion is that every mind is pre-conditioned to believe
in a god and you need to indoctrinate someone into being an atheist. It looks as
though this is what he set out to prove.
How and why the University in Oxford lends itself to this
dubious research is beyond me. There are so many newspaper articles about this
that they must know about this.
The findings were published in two separate books by
psychologist Dr Barrett in “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” and “Born
Believers”. Project Co-director Professor Roger Trigg, from the Ian Ramsey
Centre in the Theology Faculty at Oxford University, has also written a
forthcoming book …
Erm, what? No papers? No publication of data? No
peer-review? No experiments? No verification? No details or explanations what
was asked by whom where and when? Are there falsifiable tests?
Straight from hypothesis to book?
Where have I heard that before? In science?!
Let's follow the other lead: the money. How can Oxford
University fund such a project? Well, it turns out they didn't.
If you track down the actual research sites for the CRT
project, you see something interesting: the money, the $4m, were not paid by
the University, but by the John Templeton Foundation. Ah, that's why!
The John Templeton Foundation?
A man, Sir John Templeton, became very rich in the money
industry and. in 1972, established the Templeton Prize for Progress in
Religion, giving away $60m each year. The money from this institution was used
to fund the project.
What was the goal of the project? It was to explore and
research ideas about gods and spirits, the afterlife, spirit possession,
prayer, ritual, religious expertise, and connections between religious thought
and morality and pro-social behaviour.
So we have a devout Christian who thinks that people were
crafted by the Christian God to be in a loving relationship with him. He leads
a project to explore the possibility of a built-in god in humans, funded by a
religious institution bent on finding proof for a god.
Is this science? Or is this "confirmation
bias" and "biased interpretation"?
How did our religious zealot researcher go about researching
religion? He formed a team and got people in different countries to talk to
children. I have no clue whether any other research was combined with this or
how they got others in different countries to cooperate but the result is that
because children can be made to believe in a god then all humanity can too. And
actually, when deposited on an island, children will start believing in a god.
Apparently there are 40 additional studies available all linked to this one and
all available at Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind. But these are not
scientific studies but rather philosophical essays, nothing more.
I could not believe this nonsense and started looking for
the actual data. And I did find some of it. Clicking on show results or
anything results in "Page not found". Pity. The few publications I
did find only contained the hypothesis, but not the methodology or results.
I found out that they were basing their research on earlier
papers around child beliefs and religious indoctrination such as:
·
Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology
·
The psychology of religion
·
Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology
·
Homo Symbolicus and Homo Religiosus
·
The Naturalness of Childhood Theistic Beliefs
·
Young Life Ministries and Teen Spiritual
Transformation
·
What is spirit possession?
·
Do Spirits have Bodies?
·
Do ghosts get itchy?
·
Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science
·
Normative judgement: evidential needs
It's unbelievable. Looking for the actual results I found
that it centred around the comparison of 3- and 5-year-old children and how
they changed from believing their mothers knew what was in a closed box to not
knowing while maintaining that their god would know in both age groups. This
scientifically and irrevocably proves all humans automatically believe in gods
and that human thought processes are “rooted” in religious concepts. They also
found that even adults "instinctively" believe that parts of them can
live on after they die.
Oh boy!
While I was able to easily find other, older papers along
with their questions and all the statistics, I was unable to dig up any detail
on this project. I just found some summarised results without any of the
necessary underlying data, such as:
• Children and adults have a tendency to
see the natural world as having function or purpose
• In early childhood we have a natural
tendency to attribute super properties to other humans and gods
• Children commonly invent invisible
friends
• it may be that we have to be talked out
of beliefs in the afterlife (or even a life before birth!), rather than talked
into them
• Religious beliefs and practices might
persist in part because they make us more cooperative and generous with others
We see a lot of what I consider to be highly unscientific
"might" this and "maybe" that. What I am missing: did they
ask children which had been left unindoctrinated, as it were, to answer the
same questions?
What part of asking an undisclosed number of children
undisclosed questions is scientific?
Is putting the words science or scientific into a title
sufficient to be taken and understood as science or scientific?
How is merely stating that looking whether
"scientific explanations for religion support or undermine religious
beliefs" in any way scientific? What makes this more than simple wishful
thinking?
So children do NOT have any tendency to anything except food
and adoring their parents.
And once again: atheism is the lack of a belief that
evidence exists for the existence of a god, and is not acquired or taught.
Finally, this is what Prof A. C. Grayling, Professor of
Philosophy at the University of London, had to say about it:
This claim was the subject of
Barrett's lecture at Cambridge, in which he exhibited his reasons for thinking
that children are innately disposed to believe in intelligent
design/creationism and a supreme being. His real reasons for thinking this, of
course, are that he is a man of faith funded by a faith-based organisation; but
the reasons he professed were that children have an innate tendency when small
to interpret what happens in the world to be the outcome of purposive agency.
Now on this point he and I,
an atheist funded by no organisation keen on promoting atheism, agree.
Children's earliest experiences are of purposive agency in the adults and other
people around them – these being the entities of most interest to them in their
first months – and for good evolutionary reasons they are extremely credulous,
not only believing that things must be acting as their parents do in being self-moving
and intentional, but also believing in tooth fairies, Father Christmas, and a
host of other things beside, almost all of which they give up believing before
puberty, unless the beliefs are socially reinforced – as with religious and, to
a lesser extent, certain other superstitious beliefs. Intellectual maturation
is the process in important part of weaning oneself from the assumption that
trees and shadows behave as they do for the same reason that one's parents,
other humans, and dogs and cats do; it is every bit as natural a fact about
children that they cease to apply intentionalistic explanations to everything
as that they give them to everything, on the model of their parents' behaviour,
in the earliest phases of development.
But Barrett and friends infer
from the first half of these unexceptionable facts that children are hardwired
to believe in a supreme being. Not only does this ignore the evidence from
developmental psychology about the second stage of cognitive maturation, but is
in itself a very big – and obviously hopeful – jump indeed. Moreover it ignores
the fact that large tracts of humankind (the Chinese for a numerous example)
have no beliefs in a supreme being, innate or learned, and that most primitive
religion is animistic, a simple extension of the agency-imputing explanation
which gives each tree its dryad and each stream its nymph, no supreme beings
required.
"Religious belief"
and early childhood interpretations of how the world work are so far removed
from one another that only a preconceived desire to interpret the latter in
terms of "intelligent design" and "a supreme being" – the
very terms are a giveaway – is obviously tendentious, and this is what is going
on here. It would merely be poor stuff if that was all there is to it; but
there is more. The Templeton Foundation is rich; it offers a very large money
prize to any scientist or philosopher who will say things friendly to religion,
and it supports "research" as described above into anything that will
add credibility and respectability to religion. Its website portrays its aims
as serious and objective, but in truth it is just another example of how
well-funded and well-organised some religious lobbies are – a common phenomenon
in the United States in particular, and now infecting the body politic here.
But the Templeton Foundation
would do better to be frank about its propagandistic intentions, for while it
tries to dress itself in the lineaments of objectivity it will always face the
accusation of tainting the pool, as with the work of this Oxford University
institute.
Indeed I question the
advisability of Oxford taking funds from the Templeton Foundation for this kind
of work. I wonder whether it has undertaken due diligence on this one. I hope
it would not take money supporting research for astrology, Tarot divination,
proof that the Olympian deities still exist, and the like. The general claims
of religion differ not one jot in intellectual respects – or respectability –
from these. Perhaps it should think again.
People:
Most of Dr. Barrett’s academic work has concerned cognitive
scientific approaches to the study of religion; a new project in this area will
be helping to extend cognitive science of religion to China, for which he won a
grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (2011-2014). His current
research interests include cognitive, evolutionary, and psychological
approaches to the study of religion; cognitive approaches to the study of
culture and archaeology generally; and religious and character development in children
and adolescents.
Dr Petrovich is currently studying origins of basic
theological concepts in everyday cognition. She lectures for the Faculty of
Theology in the Psychology of Religion.
The papers
Templeton Foundation
The childish beliefs of Dr Justin Barrett
Comments
The project papers
Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief
Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Cognitive Science of
Religion)
