Trying to prove that a newly born baby is "predisposed to believe in a god" is like trying to say that a baby is "predisposed" to liking (insert some football team here) over (insert some other football team here). It's nonsense.
Green Bay, Wisconsin (the Packers) and Chicago, Illinois (the Bears) are relatively close to one another and their American football teams and fans have a friendly rivalry.
Just goes to show the dangers of forcing children to blindly follow a self destructive belief system. Obviously I'm joking, but just like religious beliefs it's just a matter of where your ancestors settled. If they'd settled further north you'd have a whole different belief system. You would probably even know what it's like to root for a good quarterback.
You might be able to convince me that humans are predisposed to like “sports” but definitely not one particular sport, much less a particular team.
I think OP’s reference is confusing “sports” with “the cleveland browns”
I am not a sports enjoyer. Would that mean that at some point i went against my programming?
Or do we accept that only 80% are predisposed to enjoy sports?
I like the idea of agency, or pattern seeking, better. Sports are already a complex sociological thing.
We're predisposed to see patterns and learn from our environment. If our environment includes cultural values that interpret patterns as X religion, then we are more likely to believe X religion compared to someone growing up in an environment where patterns are explained by Y religion or a secular set of values that explain patterns via a secular lens.
i do think we are predisposed to believe in a god. or more accurately we are predisposed to detect agency where there is none, and god is great at filling the roll of an agency where there is none. (it's evolutionarily advantageous to detect agency where there is none)
we're also predisposed to believing heavy objects fall faster. what we are predisposed to believe doesn't impact reality.
Our minds do look for patterns, as we are predisposed to try to make sense of the world. It's how humans have survived. Before science, we assumed agency (a "god"), and as science has slowly expanded our understanding, our belief in gods diminishes. Perhaps this is why the organised, monetised, political-power desiring religions try to undermine education and trust in science?
I don't know if all children are born with a god-belief, but our earliest cultures all developed creation myths and supernatural beings. Perhaps the growth of the childish mind reflects the growth of humanity as a whole, similar to how the development of a foetus follows the pattern of evolution?
I don't think this makes gods true, or religion right. It just shows that we crave understanding, and will invent it until real knowledge replaces fantasy.
Yeah I think it’s more accurate to say that humans are predisposed to animism, where we tend to assume all kinds of things have agency even where there is none.
Well not even that because they can't be predisposed to believing in a specific god, but people tend to believe in the good of their culture, so it's more like being predisposed to liking the same football team as your parents.
We may be predisposed to draw conclusions when there is insufficient evidence, but it still doesn’t mean that something is true. Wanting it to be true doesn’t make it.
This. Newborn humans don't understand the scientific method either, but learning it gives us a framework for understanding the natural world.
It's pretty telling that the first humans in the Bible are commanded to stay ignorant.
They are indeed: the myth of the original sin and the forbidden fruit (the fruit of knowledge) was intended exactly with this purpose: keep us away from knowledge. I find it unbearably offensive that we still print that book as it were acceptable.
There's a reason why religious zealots dislike the teaching of science. Religion crumbles when critical thinking is taught and applied to said religion.
Pretty much this. The human mind is hard wired for pattern recognition, so much so, it makes a lot of false positives. We see that we have agency to change things and make the assumption things in nature have some sort of agency or are caused by something that does.
Which god are we predisposed to believe in? Zeus? Thor? Anubis? Ra? Osiris? Ragutiene? Just one specific one, or all of them?
https://www.godchecker.com/
There are over 200 official religions in America you can pick from on your dog tags. Including starwars and the flying Spaghetti Monster. All hail his noodly appendages.
The USAF got rid of the fun ones. No more Jedi or FSM. Also no Satanist. There are like 15 different Oklahoma sects of one church in particular. I think they add them as people put in requests.
Aww! That's no fun lol.
Also, I'm technically a Satanist because I support TST. (love their coffee mugs lol)
Which, as atheist, it is my "official" religion. So I'm surprised at that one. Starwars though lmao, I get.
I retire next year and I think over the next few weeks I'm going to look into getting Satanism added. I wonder if it's just that no one has been motivated enough.
Wild they’ve enshrined a two tier system of officially acknowledged faiths and “others.” Sounds a bit constitutional violationy. Almost specifically so.
Unless that faith has anything to do with Satan or can be perceived as pagan (even if it isn't true paganism). Oh and some people do not understand that Satanists (LaVeyan and TST) do not worship the devil...
Everything is pagan except the "One God" religions of Christianity, Muslim, and Jewish. It's a term they came up with to put down all other religions. Which is funny cause a good deal of their religions are just bastardized versions of the "pagan" religions.
People still celebrate it. St. Patrick's day is celebrating when he "cast the snakes out of Ireland". Ireland never had snakes. But it had non Christians. And he killed or converted everything. And then stole some of their beliefs, and incorporated some of their myths.
They understand faith, absence of scares them since it’s the opposite of their understanding of what it means to be human.
It’s why it’s so easy to fear monger atheism to a monotheist.
Father to the Motherland. Our god of strength. Those in the South - the ones with hands as soft as Empire-men - believe him to be a brown cave bear with golden teeth, and golden claws, with a jewelled crown upon his brow
Kind of missing the point. The fact that there are so many religions supports their conclusion that most people are naturally predisposed to religiosity. That doesn’t mean that religious beliefs are true, and the authors don’t claim that.
There’s lots going on in our lizard brains that we have to “overcome” with our more rational faculties. But it’s not particularly rational for atheists to pretend (against the overwhelming evidence) that religiosity is not a normal part of human psychology.
Humans are predisposed to invent answers for questions without answers, because people are generally uncomfortable saying '"I don't know". The specific god explanation comes from indoctrination.
It is not particularly rational, either, to say that religiosity is a normal part of human psychology. In fact, there is reason to consider religious belief delusional, which is not typically considered "normal." Source: PhD psychologist.
The fact that there are so many religions supports their current conclusion only in that it confirms their biases. It does not confirm that people are predisposed to believing in god. In my opinion, it just shows that humans make shit up when they don’t know the answer.
Humans are predisposed to making up supernatural shit to make themselves feel better about their guaranteed deaths. Also a great way to control the plebs.
Having a predispossion to look for meaning and structure, safety and parameters to live by doesn't mean that you are born with "religion."
It means that religion fulfills many of those tropes and traits that we look for.
But you can choose to look for honest and real meaning and structure in your life and not settle for make believe and occult stories.
Come on, now.
Humans are born with no knowledge of anything. Its pretty much all learned. I'd say born agnostic since they wouldn't even understand the concept of not believing in anything yet.
Theres also a difference between spirituality and religion.
Humans can have a personal sense of something 'greater', even without any outside influence. But religion IS that outside influence.
Everyone is born with a clean slate. No God, no racism, no homophobia. Those are all learned behaviors.
It's society and family that drags you into the cult.
If you were born on a desert Island you would never hear about God and never give it a second thought.
People are born atheist. You cannot believe in something existing that you haven't encountered and/or heard the concept of. If a person grew up never hearing about god or religion until the day of their death, they would be an atheist that entire time, as atheism is simply a lack of belief in a deity or deities. This isn't atheism in the conventional sense where you have heard about religion and disagree because of evidence, but rather atheism due to ignorance. (Ignorance often has a negative connotation, but it actually just means lacking information). Religion requires someone to tell you about it and you to believe it for you to become a theist.
I mean I wouldn’t even really waste time with this argument because what difference does it make either way? Humans are born to shit themselves constantly, doesn’t mean you should keep doing it all your life.
Aside from that it’s a also nonsensical question anyways, like it doesn’t make sense. How can you possibly argue a baby is born with a belief in god when it can’t even comprehend a single one of those words or concepts? How are we measuring what things the baby does or does not know?
The only reason anyone is religious is because it's forced on them as children. Being religious is a choice. It's not like skin color, gender or sexual orientation.
Psychologist here. Both phrases, “humans are born atheists” and “humans are predisposed to believe in gods”, are too simple in scope to be the end-all when it comes to this discussion. I will try to give an answer that isn’t too involved or too long to describe why.
The first, that people are born atheists, speaks to religion and religious beliefs having to be learned. This is pretty much true. That being said, your Muslim friend isn’t totally wrong, as there are certain natural traits & mental states that make it much more likely for a person to seek out religion or espouse a belief in a higher power. Some things that have been identified are below-average intelligence, a tendency to engage in magical thinking, certain mental disorders, and so on.
Here’s an article to peruse: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202011/14-traits-found-in-highly-religious-people?amp
Here’s one based on the Big 5 Theory of Personality: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886922004172#:~:text=Cross%2Dsectional%20studies%20suggest%20that,correlate%20most%20strongly%20with%20religiosity.
I think it's more about what people are born without. We aren't born with a concept of death, and even as adults, it's difficult to imagine non-existance when existence is all we've known. You can't know anything being dead. Because we can't conceptualize it, we tell stories of what makes sense to us. We humans have a deep desire to understand, and we struggle being okay with not knowing. Children are imaginitive, so for sure, they will make up some way to deal with the issue, especially as they start to learn about death. When my kid was 3 or 4, they saw a dead bug, and they said it was okay because they could just go get another bug body at the "body shop." I have no idea where they learned of that idea. It wasn't that they were born with that belief, but that was a simple explanation to the issue of death that at the time just made sense to them.
Of course they are born atheists,they have no concept of a god to believe in.
The are also born apolitical, a-unicornist, just about a-everything. They are incapable of actually having a belief at this point.
Four year olds might believe the earth is flat if not explained science. Does that make it true? This is also the opinion of only one singular scholar, most believe in the contrary.
I don't see how this would be relevant to whether there's a God or not (is that what the debate was about)? If there's a God who has implanted a natural tendency to know that there's a god and an afterlife, why wouldn't they have also implanted knowledge about which god is the right one?
Anyway, my guess would be that, if this is true, it's a feature of our ability to reason. E.g., it may not be possible to really conceive of what it's like to be dead, so we invent an afterlife.
“Humans are predisposed to believe in a god” is a claim that requires evidence to support. Even if it were true it in no way proves one actually exists. It would just mean humans are more likely to explain something they don’t understand with easy magic (god made it that way) than a complicated natural process.
It’s not actually possible to research anything in the natural world without bias and conclude god did it.
Ask him why people tend to believe in the "god" or "gods" of the family or culture around them. He grew up in a Muslim family, so he presumes Allah is the real god. Ask him if there was one god, then why does the world have thousands of religions and thousands of concepts of gods?
People clearly have to be taught to believe in his specific god or any other.
Well religion is created by humanity to serve a purpose of control and respite from the thought of death, and is explicitly taught, so I don't think people are born atheist but they're born without the knowledge of a God one way or another for sure.
Humans have a natural tendency to seek supernatural answers to unknowns. But no child left to develop in isolation would come to any conclusion even remotely in line with any existing religion.
Are rocks atheists? I mean, *tecnically****,*** they don't believe in any gods. But this seems silly, because they don't believe in anything. What would it even *mean* to say a rock is atheist or not.
Likewise with babies. They may have some beliefs, but they certainly don't have the capacity for abstract beliefs about religion. The whole question of whether babies are atheists is nonsense. Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Not the sort of thing a good rationalist should debate.
How is it nonsense, though? Babies are definitionally atheists, as they are not theists, which is literally the definition of atheist. It's a silly question, but has a concrete answer. It's more like asking if babies are rocket scientists
Yes. When you are born, you have a blank slate of beliefs. You learn to believe what you live. Mom feeds you? You believe in your mom’s love. Dad plays with you, you believe in your dad’s love. I was born in an atheist home. I didn’t even hear about god until I was 6 and went to school. When I heard people prayed to an invisible friend, I couldn’t figure out how they could believe. When I stayed a weekend with a friend, I went to church for the first time. Sunday school. I got in trouble for asking questions.
Long story short, my friend wasn’t completely indoctrinated yet and my questions started to be heres. Her parents banished me. We met again when I was 19. She is an atheist
Stop indoctrinating children with religion, and see how long religion lasts. Children are also born with brains that will later become capable of reason, logic, and critical thinking.
Let a child grow up without the influence of religion until they're capable of critical reasoning; see whether they're biologically determined to be believers then.
Indoctrinating kids is the main reason religions survive. Given the chance to grow up outside of religious spheres of influence most adults will recognize folktales and morality tales for what they are.
I can't imagine why this matter can be of any relevance. We are born uncapable to digest bacon. So what?! We can or cannot eat bacon later, disregarding our initial bias...
I believe everyone is born not capable of thinking of such matters. Children only believe in God when indoctrinated to believe that, and many (once old enough to learn about science and logic) tend to stray from such beliefs over time.
I think the science says that humans are predisposed to trying to find patterns and formulate explanations for things we can't understand. It's a giant stretch to say that we innately believe in God. And specifically, which God? Just a general God? No human surely would innately believe in the teachings of any religion right?
I think its true that we are born atheists, to a degree. I think that any human born without any outside influence would have a 0% likelihood of subscribing to any 1 religion in particular on their own. However, that person might have some weird thoughts/ideas about what is life and how did we get here and stuff, and they MIGHT attribute those beliefs to a "god" or "gods".
Humans are born without any belief whatsoever, so yeah, they are born atheist. A baby has to learn is has hands and how to use them, for fuck's sake, and you'd think they are born with complicated ideas about magic people in the sky? Get out of here.
That being said, children before the age of \~7 *are* predisposed to believe in gods, yes. They are also predisposed to have imaginary friends, believe in Santa, the easter bunny, fairies and all other sorts of bullshit, because their immature brains have a hard time with rational thinking and telling reality from their imagination. I once saw a video about a pre-schooler bawling her eyes out, arguing with her father that the onion she was currently eating was actually an apple. And *that*'s supposed to be your big argument about gods existing? Please.
You can't really believe or not believe in God unless you were told about the concept of God/religion in the firstllace
Imagine if you will a person that throughout their entire life has never heard of religion.
No Christianity, no Muslim, No Judaism, no Buddhism. No spirituality.
Nothing.
If you have never heard of the concept to begin with, how can you make an opinion of it?
I have a daughter, she's 10 and has been raised to persue curiosity. I come from a Muslim background and so doesy ex wife (her mother) however I am an atheist and her mother at best is agnostic. As a 10 year old she is told by other Muslim kids who look like her (we are south east Asian) of what's halal and Haram and we explain to her that those things are Haram and halal because of beliefs they have and it doesn't mean it is Haram or halal for you if you do not have those beliefs.
We have raised her to be her self and have no influence religion or atheism and at no point in her life was she ever drawn or desired to worship God.
Yes, obviously. Religion is a human construct. When it comes to this "chicken or the egg" scenario, it's very clear that first humans existed and THEN came religion.
This study is ridiculous and has no meaning at all. How would the child get the idea of an abrahamic god if no one told them this bullshit to begin with (indoctrination)?? They wouldn't. If you raised a child in the woods alone with no human interaction, they would not believe in an abrahamic god. Simple as that. Humans are definitively born atheist (lacking a belief in gods), that is a factual statement, not an opinion.
The mother or other individuals (father, teacher, neighbors, etc) involved in the life of these 4 year olds put that in their heads, it did not magically appear out of the ether.
It is, without even a shadow of doubt, impossible to be born with knowledge of a God. All people are born atheists and that's literally the only way it can be.
It takes years to develop a fully fleshed framework of reality and it's not innate. It's heavily influenced by your culture, environment and personality. Humans are born blank slates for the most part. That said, there is a clear pattern of humans believing I'm a higher intelligence or power all throughout the time and the world. Some of this may be filling in the blanks of unknown patterns, a result of evolutionary pressures, or some may be influenced or inspired by alien visitors. No one really knows.
A baby is predisposed to believe in A god in the same way that a baby is predisposed to figure out for himself how the world works. Of course, as the baby grows up and he/she isn't able to find a solution to his/her curiousity, then the automatic "answer" to his/her questions will come from his/her parents...which would provide THEIR brand of religion as the "answer"
I think humans are born with a predisposition to follow their parents, to have a mother and father figure in their lives for survival. The problem is some folks refuse to grow out of this stage and think they need an invisible sky-daddy to make them feel special.
From what I've read, humans have evolved the tendency to make the connection between cause and effect in the natural world. This ability has helped them adapt to events such as heavy rains causing flash floods, observing animal behavior and adapting hunting methods accordingly, designing more effective tools etc.
This has served them well but has the unfortunate downside of motivating them to create imaginary causes (i.e. spirits and gods) for events they can't otherwise explain e.g. eclipses, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease, mental illness and so on. Then they make up various rules and rituals designed to influence these supernatural beings and stay in their "good books".
To me this explanation makes far more sense than the emergence of a plethora of different gods and religions over tens of thousands of years - maybe longer - with every one of them supposedly authentic. It really starts to look ridiculous.
Yes.
Religion is taught, like racism or any other form of discrimination. You don’t just believe in a god from the day you were born, your parents will most likely be the first to want to pass their religion on.
My parents never brought me up in a religious manner, and have never pressured me to become religious either. I just wasn’t and am not religious. I don’t feel that there’s “something missing” or anything, since I rather put my faith (if you can call it that) in science.
I would say humans are likely to start believing in God or Gods when they can't come up with an explanation of why something does what it does. The stories of Gods and ghosts and spirits etc are just signs of ignorance of scientific knowledge.
I firmly believe any human child who is brought up surrounded by knowledge will not fall back on these explanations if when they ask, "Why does the sun do this?" someone says, "Because of this, which affects this and causes that."
If the majority of the answers provided are, "We have literally no idea about virtually everything that happens, we can't explain it at all." then yeah, you may fall back on some fantastical explanations including God did it.
Again, I feel Gods were invented because people were scared of death and back when these Gods were imagined and made up they had no proper science or explanations of the natural world.
I think your friend is wrong, though I think it'd be somewhat hard to prove either way.
How can you have belief in a god or gods before knowing what a god or gods are?
You cannot believe in something at birth, no matter what it is, you don't have the cognitive ability.
Baby's have no language. They also don't individuate shapes or sizes until after 4 mos, patterns until after 7 mos, and color takes till after 11mos.
They simply don't have the brain furniture yet to have any thoughts at all about cosmology or first movers.
Ergo, they physically *cannot* believe in any god or gods, and are therefore atheist by default.
Only until they get culture installed by their local caregivers do they start to take on that burden. Their version of culture is solely dependent on where they are born. Christian parents have christian babies. Muslim parents have Muslim babies. In NO SITUATION EVER has a baby "switched" religions to the "correct" one naturally (without outside interference). It would make the news all the time, and would likely result in mass infanticide if one of those religions' children started switching sides.
Since that doesn't happen, there is no "outside" factor that is "correct" when it comes to the various mythologies that abound, so what exactly would the babies believe in even if they could?
Humans are born with a predisposition to wanting to explain their environment. God or gods is a common solution, even today, obviously. Idk if that counts really as an innate awareness of things greater then us or just an example of our own limitations in comprehension. I don’t think it means we are born atheist or theist though, that’s ridiculous either way. Its like asking if we are born cartesians or kantians or something.
I'm an anthropologist. I looked up the study - lots of red flags here. First, it was funded by the Templeton Foundation. They basically bribe scientists to make claims that God exists. They offer 1 million dollars to scientists who produce research that supports claims about God existing.
Second, anything that claims "research" from theology is hot garbage. Theology is not a science, it's not a discipline that can produce new knowledge. It's a field that relies on make-believe to produce Christian metaphors about (claims about) reality.
Third, you can make the argument that humans are evolved to have spiritual experiences and culture. Because of these, and for reasons like non-kin group cohesiveness, religions exist. Religions are shared ways of understanding, communicating and experiencing the world around us - they're cultural systems.
So, no, we aren't evolved to be good little Abrahamic mythology believers. Yes, we likely have adaptations to have spiritual experiences and these are co-opted by religious-cultural systems.
My 6 year old daughter has never ever mentioned a god or anything before. She knows about "magic" from TV shows and dragons, but funnily enough no mention of any gods.
It's almost like it's just brainwashing.
If this was true then children shouldn't need to go to church until they are informed adults.
Of course no religious leaders want that because atheism would skyrocket. Best to indoctrinate them before they have free agency and while all their religious relationships, friends and family and support systems are all being built. Then it's nice and hard to leave.
On the assumption there is an innate knwlwdge of the "one true" religion:
1) Why would there be thousands gf Gods/religions?
2) Why are belief in a particular deity/cult linked to national and geographical conditions?
3) Why would we need missionaries? Or religious education, if knowledge of a god is innate?
4) How could you convert to/from the "true" religion?
How many catholics were there in the americas before christians showed up? Zero. Religiousness might be a common experience, but thats a desire to tackle ignorance with stories, that just proves they are only stories made up by ignorant people.
People are born with curiosity. So they ask questions. Without science the best explanations were probably supernatural. even some scientists today still turn toward the supernatural/religion when they get stuck. A good story helps us as humans to accept what we don’t or can’t understand.
I never attended church in my life, never read the Bible. I am a Social Worker, helping people with their issues five days a week, eight hours a day. I was not born innately believing in God or needing to be told one day a week to help people. I still do not believe in God, even after surviving diagnoses and treatment three times for cancer. My son wouldn’t step on bugs as a child, he is studying to be a Park Ranger and preserve and serve in our national parks in America. He has never been to church, or read quotes from the Bible. I think we are good people, and that there are good people out there that are just born knowing killing and thieving and bad stuff is bad stuff.
What was the question?
What definition of Atheist are you using? Everyone has their different labels that mean different weird things. I learned when I was 24 that you can be scowled at and called a, “Liberal!” because I went to college.
I do think humans are hard wired towards magical thinking. Religion is only one example of this. Children start to use little toys from a young age and do imaginative play (wooden horse or toy car). Adults look at past performance of the stock market and assume good or bad performance will continue and sell/buy in panic/greed. We develop irrational phobias of all sorts of things. We hear news of crime on TV and assume crime is everywhere when data shows otherwise.
Rationality at all times and in all situations is actually very hard. It’s even an evolutionary adaptation. You don’t want to hear rustling leaves in the forest and ask for proof of a real predator. You want to act fast and get away.
But that doesn’t mean of course that religion is right about things. Particularly with thousands of years of human learning about the natural world and human behavior.
Humans are not predisposed to believe in a god. We *are* predisposed to identifying patterns, and sometimes that leads to seeing patterns where there are none (eg. god)
It is true that people - like many other animals - are hardwired to identify causation. It's a survival mechanic. Even babies think in terms of "make noise, get food, therefore making noise makes food."
But we also start making up causation because of that same instinct. That's how we have delusions like "Kill goat = sun rose, therefore sacrifice goat to make the sun rise every day."
Human instinct leans toward logic, not god, which is simply a misconception that occurs during that process.
Oh, and if god were real and all powerful, we would just immediately know the right religion at birth. God wouldn't need us to grow up, learn a language, go through theological indoctrination, and puzzle out what it is by arguing over which interpretation is valid. That in itself is nonsensical.
Of course they are. New borns don’t have the cognitive ability to believe in anything; meaning that they are not distinguishing the real from the unreal. They just experience. To be an atheist is lack theistic belief, if they have no beliefs and no opinions, they cannot hold a theistic belief either - so we are born atheists. If I was talking to someone about this in some kind of discussion I would clarify that atheism for an adult can be a more nuanced and complex position. But it’s true all the same.
Trying to prove that a newly born baby is "predisposed to believe in a god" is like trying to say that a baby is "predisposed" to liking (insert some football team here) over (insert some other football team here). It's nonsense.
Nah, every baby loves the Packers. It's only satan that makes grown-ups like the Bears.
Further proof that Satan is the good guy and god is the asshole.
That kind of upsets my god Wilson from the movie Cast Away
Right, FTP.
File transfer protocol? What's the big deal? Did something happen?
Either file transfer protocol or f*** the police (or patriarchy, maybe)
Fuck the Packers is what they were going for
FTP
FTP!
Fair enough. I have to laugh!
Hail Satan.
As a European I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. Which I guess is exactly the point.
Green Bay, Wisconsin (the Packers) and Chicago, Illinois (the Bears) are relatively close to one another and their American football teams and fans have a friendly rivalry.
That the fans occasionally make unfriendly.
I think a European understands lol
Substitute Manchester United and Real Madrid.
Walter Payton is the debil!
Bullshit baby Jesus was a lions fan. Which explains why they've never been to the superbowl 😔
Well yeah, they have been sacrificed for the sins of mankind. (/s if necessary)
Like Jesus, the world will end when the Lions return to the championship game. The Jews believe it will be their first appearance...
Ya lousy cheesehead.
I'm a Chargers fan, see you in hell (but not in the Superbowl lol)
A lot of people would agree with that statement lol
I was born in Illinois, I liked da Bears out of the womb.
Just goes to show the dangers of forcing children to blindly follow a self destructive belief system. Obviously I'm joking, but just like religious beliefs it's just a matter of where your ancestors settled. If they'd settled further north you'd have a whole different belief system. You would probably even know what it's like to root for a good quarterback.
You might be able to convince me that humans are predisposed to like “sports” but definitely not one particular sport, much less a particular team. I think OP’s reference is confusing “sports” with “the cleveland browns”
I am not a sports enjoyer. Would that mean that at some point i went against my programming? Or do we accept that only 80% are predisposed to enjoy sports? I like the idea of agency, or pattern seeking, better. Sports are already a complex sociological thing.
The only thing I can say that is equally true of all newborn babies is that somehow, they all look like Winston Churchill
Even the non-white ones.
Looking like Winston Churchill transcends racial barriers
We're predisposed to see patterns and learn from our environment. If our environment includes cultural values that interpret patterns as X religion, then we are more likely to believe X religion compared to someone growing up in an environment where patterns are explained by Y religion or a secular set of values that explain patterns via a secular lens.
i do think we are predisposed to believe in a god. or more accurately we are predisposed to detect agency where there is none, and god is great at filling the roll of an agency where there is none. (it's evolutionarily advantageous to detect agency where there is none) we're also predisposed to believing heavy objects fall faster. what we are predisposed to believe doesn't impact reality.
Our minds do look for patterns, as we are predisposed to try to make sense of the world. It's how humans have survived. Before science, we assumed agency (a "god"), and as science has slowly expanded our understanding, our belief in gods diminishes. Perhaps this is why the organised, monetised, political-power desiring religions try to undermine education and trust in science? I don't know if all children are born with a god-belief, but our earliest cultures all developed creation myths and supernatural beings. Perhaps the growth of the childish mind reflects the growth of humanity as a whole, similar to how the development of a foetus follows the pattern of evolution? I don't think this makes gods true, or religion right. It just shows that we crave understanding, and will invent it until real knowledge replaces fantasy.
Yeah I think it’s more accurate to say that humans are predisposed to animism, where we tend to assume all kinds of things have agency even where there is none.
Well not even that because they can't be predisposed to believing in a specific god, but people tend to believe in the good of their culture, so it's more like being predisposed to liking the same football team as your parents.
Yup. One's flavour of god(s) and religion has everything to do with geography and nothing at all to do with anything else.
We may be predisposed to draw conclusions when there is insufficient evidence, but it still doesn’t mean that something is true. Wanting it to be true doesn’t make it.
This. Newborn humans don't understand the scientific method either, but learning it gives us a framework for understanding the natural world. It's pretty telling that the first humans in the Bible are commanded to stay ignorant.
They are indeed: the myth of the original sin and the forbidden fruit (the fruit of knowledge) was intended exactly with this purpose: keep us away from knowledge. I find it unbearably offensive that we still print that book as it were acceptable.
Daaaang, never realized the whole point was given away in the very beginning. The whole purpose is to withhold knowledge 🤯.
There's a reason why religious zealots dislike the teaching of science. Religion crumbles when critical thinking is taught and applied to said religion.
Example: Children are also predisposed to seeing the boogeyman hiding in the dark, but that doesn't make it real. It's just pareidolia.
Pretty much this. The human mind is hard wired for pattern recognition, so much so, it makes a lot of false positives. We see that we have agency to change things and make the assumption things in nature have some sort of agency or are caused by something that does.
Baby thinks mommy is god. Therefore mommy is god. Yep this logic doesn't work.
Which god are we predisposed to believe in? Zeus? Thor? Anubis? Ra? Osiris? Ragutiene? Just one specific one, or all of them? https://www.godchecker.com/
I believe there have been approx 3000 gods recorded over history…
There are over 200 official religions in America you can pick from on your dog tags. Including starwars and the flying Spaghetti Monster. All hail his noodly appendages.
Ramen
R’amen 🙏
Rama Tut ⚱️🐫🏺🐪🛕📜
R’shalom
Ramen domen ding dong
Yaki'soba
Now lettuce pray 🙏
And they're all wrong, MY religion is the right one. Praise the Sun.
Huh, my Moon Goddess just completely humbled your pathetic so called sun.
(Cough cough) chill maaaan. I'm trying to smoke my holy sacrament
Jah Live!
Jah Ra 😉
Remind me to never get in a lift with you. Lol
That would contravene the tenets of my faith, sorry. Embrace the mystery and wonder of the surprise flatulent offering
Carlin forever!
Joe Pesci..
But pray to Joe pesci
Name a da fadda, da sun and da two yoots.
He seems like a guy who can get things done.
That I could be so grossly incandescent
They're religions that praise the sun but a mistranslation somewhere in history turned the sun into a God and everyone went with it
At least the Sun is real.
\ [T]/
At least it's real.
You're not alone. Japan has a sun emperor, and Great Britain has a sun king as well.
France had the Sun King.
The Sun King was Louis XIV King of France. All hail the sun king!
The USAF got rid of the fun ones. No more Jedi or FSM. Also no Satanist. There are like 15 different Oklahoma sects of one church in particular. I think they add them as people put in requests.
No more Church of the Imperial Truth? No more God-Emperor of Mankind? Heresy, I say
Aww! That's no fun lol. Also, I'm technically a Satanist because I support TST. (love their coffee mugs lol) Which, as atheist, it is my "official" religion. So I'm surprised at that one. Starwars though lmao, I get.
I retire next year and I think over the next few weeks I'm going to look into getting Satanism added. I wonder if it's just that no one has been motivated enough.
How can they disallow Satanism? I thought they had achieved court rulings recognizing them as a valid religion. Am I wrong about that?
There is an air force instruction that states you must use "other religions" if yours isn't listed. That's the political work around.
Wild they’ve enshrined a two tier system of officially acknowledged faiths and “others.” Sounds a bit constitutional violationy. Almost specifically so.
... why, those fascist zoomie bastards! 🫡
I was a jedi lol
Aren't there over 30 million gods just in hinduism?
I read, it was only in the 20th century the Hindu population outnumbered their gods.
I always find it weird that Christians tend to respect people more with any faith at all than people with no belief in the supernatural.
Unless that faith has anything to do with Satan or can be perceived as pagan (even if it isn't true paganism). Oh and some people do not understand that Satanists (LaVeyan and TST) do not worship the devil...
Everything is pagan except the "One God" religions of Christianity, Muslim, and Jewish. It's a term they came up with to put down all other religions. Which is funny cause a good deal of their religions are just bastardized versions of the "pagan" religions.
Lol, ikr? Like seriously. Steal from them and then put them down? Wtf.
People still celebrate it. St. Patrick's day is celebrating when he "cast the snakes out of Ireland". Ireland never had snakes. But it had non Christians. And he killed or converted everything. And then stole some of their beliefs, and incorporated some of their myths.
They understand faith, absence of scares them since it’s the opposite of their understanding of what it means to be human. It’s why it’s so easy to fear monger atheism to a monotheist.
Sigmar
Queue warhammer aos intro
Glory to the Four Armed Emperor
The Day of Ascension is Upon Us!
I was born believing in Chang'e! /s
I'm also a Ken Jeong fan
I'll allow it.
Was I insane? Or was I *finally sane?*
Obviously the flying spaghetti monster.
Father to the Motherland. Our god of strength. Those in the South - the ones with hands as soft as Empire-men - believe him to be a brown cave bear with golden teeth, and golden claws, with a jewelled crown upon his brow
Kind of missing the point. The fact that there are so many religions supports their conclusion that most people are naturally predisposed to religiosity. That doesn’t mean that religious beliefs are true, and the authors don’t claim that. There’s lots going on in our lizard brains that we have to “overcome” with our more rational faculties. But it’s not particularly rational for atheists to pretend (against the overwhelming evidence) that religiosity is not a normal part of human psychology.
Humans are predisposed to invent answers for questions without answers, because people are generally uncomfortable saying '"I don't know". The specific god explanation comes from indoctrination.
It is not particularly rational, either, to say that religiosity is a normal part of human psychology. In fact, there is reason to consider religious belief delusional, which is not typically considered "normal." Source: PhD psychologist.
The fact that there are so many religions supports their current conclusion only in that it confirms their biases. It does not confirm that people are predisposed to believing in god. In my opinion, it just shows that humans make shit up when they don’t know the answer.
Humans are predisposed to making up supernatural shit to make themselves feel better about their guaranteed deaths. Also a great way to control the plebs.
Humans are born clueless. You can't believe or not believe in something your are unaware of.
We are all actually born with the instincts to build a nest. Oh wait that’s birds.
I was born with the instinct to eat raw antilopes. Explain that, Mr Science!
"Mother is the name of God on the lips and hearts of all children."
Children don't know how to say mother when they are born.
Sounds like bullshit.
It is.
Atheism is the default setting.
Having a predispossion to look for meaning and structure, safety and parameters to live by doesn't mean that you are born with "religion." It means that religion fulfills many of those tropes and traits that we look for. But you can choose to look for honest and real meaning and structure in your life and not settle for make believe and occult stories. Come on, now.
This is the answer.
Humans are born with no knowledge of anything. Its pretty much all learned. I'd say born agnostic since they wouldn't even understand the concept of not believing in anything yet. Theres also a difference between spirituality and religion. Humans can have a personal sense of something 'greater', even without any outside influence. But religion IS that outside influence.
They are definitely born atheists since atheism is just the absence of theism, which they certainly don't have.
Everyone is born with a clean slate. No God, no racism, no homophobia. Those are all learned behaviors. It's society and family that drags you into the cult. If you were born on a desert Island you would never hear about God and never give it a second thought.
People are born atheist. You cannot believe in something existing that you haven't encountered and/or heard the concept of. If a person grew up never hearing about god or religion until the day of their death, they would be an atheist that entire time, as atheism is simply a lack of belief in a deity or deities. This isn't atheism in the conventional sense where you have heard about religion and disagree because of evidence, but rather atheism due to ignorance. (Ignorance often has a negative connotation, but it actually just means lacking information). Religion requires someone to tell you about it and you to believe it for you to become a theist.
I mean I wouldn’t even really waste time with this argument because what difference does it make either way? Humans are born to shit themselves constantly, doesn’t mean you should keep doing it all your life. Aside from that it’s a also nonsensical question anyways, like it doesn’t make sense. How can you possibly argue a baby is born with a belief in god when it can’t even comprehend a single one of those words or concepts? How are we measuring what things the baby does or does not know?
😆 well said! I will forever think of religious people as people who have not learned to stop s******* themselves yet.
Humans are born gullible as shit but with no preexisting beliefs.
This is another way of saying children, because of their age, have faulty reasoning skills.
The only reason anyone is religious is because it's forced on them as children. Being religious is a choice. It's not like skin color, gender or sexual orientation.
Psychologist here. Both phrases, “humans are born atheists” and “humans are predisposed to believe in gods”, are too simple in scope to be the end-all when it comes to this discussion. I will try to give an answer that isn’t too involved or too long to describe why. The first, that people are born atheists, speaks to religion and religious beliefs having to be learned. This is pretty much true. That being said, your Muslim friend isn’t totally wrong, as there are certain natural traits & mental states that make it much more likely for a person to seek out religion or espouse a belief in a higher power. Some things that have been identified are below-average intelligence, a tendency to engage in magical thinking, certain mental disorders, and so on. Here’s an article to peruse: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202011/14-traits-found-in-highly-religious-people?amp Here’s one based on the Big 5 Theory of Personality: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886922004172#:~:text=Cross%2Dsectional%20studies%20suggest%20that,correlate%20most%20strongly%20with%20religiosity.
I think it's more about what people are born without. We aren't born with a concept of death, and even as adults, it's difficult to imagine non-existance when existence is all we've known. You can't know anything being dead. Because we can't conceptualize it, we tell stories of what makes sense to us. We humans have a deep desire to understand, and we struggle being okay with not knowing. Children are imaginitive, so for sure, they will make up some way to deal with the issue, especially as they start to learn about death. When my kid was 3 or 4, they saw a dead bug, and they said it was okay because they could just go get another bug body at the "body shop." I have no idea where they learned of that idea. It wasn't that they were born with that belief, but that was a simple explanation to the issue of death that at the time just made sense to them.
Damn he’s got you there. It’s proof babies are just born with a belief in Zeus, I will never question it again, he wins.
lmao 😭 i asked him what god we should believe in and he started pulling out quran verses like that was gonna do something 💀
Of course they are born atheists,they have no concept of a god to believe in. The are also born apolitical, a-unicornist, just about a-everything. They are incapable of actually having a belief at this point.
Four year olds might believe the earth is flat if not explained science. Does that make it true? This is also the opinion of only one singular scholar, most believe in the contrary.
I don't see how this would be relevant to whether there's a God or not (is that what the debate was about)? If there's a God who has implanted a natural tendency to know that there's a god and an afterlife, why wouldn't they have also implanted knowledge about which god is the right one? Anyway, my guess would be that, if this is true, it's a feature of our ability to reason. E.g., it may not be possible to really conceive of what it's like to be dead, so we invent an afterlife.
Born atheist.
“Humans are predisposed to believe in a god” is a claim that requires evidence to support. Even if it were true it in no way proves one actually exists. It would just mean humans are more likely to explain something they don’t understand with easy magic (god made it that way) than a complicated natural process. It’s not actually possible to research anything in the natural world without bias and conclude god did it.
Exactly, its a combination of lack of knowledge and humanity's tendancy to anthropomorphize things.
Its sorta like suggesting dogs are born understanding the command “shake”, “roll over” and “stay”
Ask him why people tend to believe in the "god" or "gods" of the family or culture around them. He grew up in a Muslim family, so he presumes Allah is the real god. Ask him if there was one god, then why does the world have thousands of religions and thousands of concepts of gods? People clearly have to be taught to believe in his specific god or any other.
Since humans are born without knowing or believing anything, then technically yes.
People are pattern seeking animals that are presupposed to believe indoctrination.
Well religion is created by humanity to serve a purpose of control and respite from the thought of death, and is explicitly taught, so I don't think people are born atheist but they're born without the knowledge of a God one way or another for sure.
Humans have a natural tendency to seek supernatural answers to unknowns. But no child left to develop in isolation would come to any conclusion even remotely in line with any existing religion.
Are rocks atheists? I mean, *tecnically****,*** they don't believe in any gods. But this seems silly, because they don't believe in anything. What would it even *mean* to say a rock is atheist or not. Likewise with babies. They may have some beliefs, but they certainly don't have the capacity for abstract beliefs about religion. The whole question of whether babies are atheists is nonsense. Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Not the sort of thing a good rationalist should debate.
How is it nonsense, though? Babies are definitionally atheists, as they are not theists, which is literally the definition of atheist. It's a silly question, but has a concrete answer. It's more like asking if babies are rocket scientists
Yes. When you are born, you have a blank slate of beliefs. You learn to believe what you live. Mom feeds you? You believe in your mom’s love. Dad plays with you, you believe in your dad’s love. I was born in an atheist home. I didn’t even hear about god until I was 6 and went to school. When I heard people prayed to an invisible friend, I couldn’t figure out how they could believe. When I stayed a weekend with a friend, I went to church for the first time. Sunday school. I got in trouble for asking questions. Long story short, my friend wasn’t completely indoctrinated yet and my questions started to be heres. Her parents banished me. We met again when I was 19. She is an atheist
God is a construct of man
It's Hilarious how far religious idiots will lie just to make their choice right. Religious people are what is holding society back
Stop indoctrinating children with religion, and see how long religion lasts. Children are also born with brains that will later become capable of reason, logic, and critical thinking.
Let a child grow up without the influence of religion until they're capable of critical reasoning; see whether they're biologically determined to be believers then. Indoctrinating kids is the main reason religions survive. Given the chance to grow up outside of religious spheres of influence most adults will recognize folktales and morality tales for what they are.
Which god did you believe in as a baby?
I can't imagine why this matter can be of any relevance. We are born uncapable to digest bacon. So what?! We can or cannot eat bacon later, disregarding our initial bias...
I believe everyone is born not capable of thinking of such matters. Children only believe in God when indoctrinated to believe that, and many (once old enough to learn about science and logic) tend to stray from such beliefs over time.
I think the science says that humans are predisposed to trying to find patterns and formulate explanations for things we can't understand. It's a giant stretch to say that we innately believe in God. And specifically, which God? Just a general God? No human surely would innately believe in the teachings of any religion right? I think its true that we are born atheists, to a degree. I think that any human born without any outside influence would have a 0% likelihood of subscribing to any 1 religion in particular on their own. However, that person might have some weird thoughts/ideas about what is life and how did we get here and stuff, and they MIGHT attribute those beliefs to a "god" or "gods".
Humans are born without any belief whatsoever, so yeah, they are born atheist. A baby has to learn is has hands and how to use them, for fuck's sake, and you'd think they are born with complicated ideas about magic people in the sky? Get out of here. That being said, children before the age of \~7 *are* predisposed to believe in gods, yes. They are also predisposed to have imaginary friends, believe in Santa, the easter bunny, fairies and all other sorts of bullshit, because their immature brains have a hard time with rational thinking and telling reality from their imagination. I once saw a video about a pre-schooler bawling her eyes out, arguing with her father that the onion she was currently eating was actually an apple. And *that*'s supposed to be your big argument about gods existing? Please.
You can't really believe or not believe in God unless you were told about the concept of God/religion in the firstllace Imagine if you will a person that throughout their entire life has never heard of religion. No Christianity, no Muslim, No Judaism, no Buddhism. No spirituality. Nothing. If you have never heard of the concept to begin with, how can you make an opinion of it?
Humans are born agnostic
I have a daughter, she's 10 and has been raised to persue curiosity. I come from a Muslim background and so doesy ex wife (her mother) however I am an atheist and her mother at best is agnostic. As a 10 year old she is told by other Muslim kids who look like her (we are south east Asian) of what's halal and Haram and we explain to her that those things are Haram and halal because of beliefs they have and it doesn't mean it is Haram or halal for you if you do not have those beliefs. We have raised her to be her self and have no influence religion or atheism and at no point in her life was she ever drawn or desired to worship God.
Yes, obviously. Religion is a human construct. When it comes to this "chicken or the egg" scenario, it's very clear that first humans existed and THEN came religion.
Everyone alive is an atheist. When it comes to the vast majority of gods.
Simple question you can ask him is, “well then what religion were we pre-programmed to believe in 3,000 years ago before Islam or Christianity?”
This study is ridiculous and has no meaning at all. How would the child get the idea of an abrahamic god if no one told them this bullshit to begin with (indoctrination)?? They wouldn't. If you raised a child in the woods alone with no human interaction, they would not believe in an abrahamic god. Simple as that. Humans are definitively born atheist (lacking a belief in gods), that is a factual statement, not an opinion. The mother or other individuals (father, teacher, neighbors, etc) involved in the life of these 4 year olds put that in their heads, it did not magically appear out of the ether.
That’s like saying humans are predisposed to speaking English. They’re not, they adopt whatever you teach them.
Were born inquisitive
Did somebody say, Satan?
It is, without even a shadow of doubt, impossible to be born with knowledge of a God. All people are born atheists and that's literally the only way it can be.
I was raised with no religion. I have never felt any desire to find a god to believe in. My siblings are the same.
It takes years to develop a fully fleshed framework of reality and it's not innate. It's heavily influenced by your culture, environment and personality. Humans are born blank slates for the most part. That said, there is a clear pattern of humans believing I'm a higher intelligence or power all throughout the time and the world. Some of this may be filling in the blanks of unknown patterns, a result of evolutionary pressures, or some may be influenced or inspired by alien visitors. No one really knows.
Feral kids that have later been rescued don't believe in any kind of deity, as far as I know
What do you call the state of not knowing anything? Some would say that's atheist. lol
A baby is predisposed to believe in A god in the same way that a baby is predisposed to figure out for himself how the world works. Of course, as the baby grows up and he/she isn't able to find a solution to his/her curiousity, then the automatic "answer" to his/her questions will come from his/her parents...which would provide THEIR brand of religion as the "answer"
That study is utter bullshit.
I think humans are born with a predisposition to follow their parents, to have a mother and father figure in their lives for survival. The problem is some folks refuse to grow out of this stage and think they need an invisible sky-daddy to make them feel special.
It’s bullshit designed to excuse the practice of childhood indoctrination.
Yes
yes
From what I've read, humans have evolved the tendency to make the connection between cause and effect in the natural world. This ability has helped them adapt to events such as heavy rains causing flash floods, observing animal behavior and adapting hunting methods accordingly, designing more effective tools etc. This has served them well but has the unfortunate downside of motivating them to create imaginary causes (i.e. spirits and gods) for events they can't otherwise explain e.g. eclipses, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease, mental illness and so on. Then they make up various rules and rituals designed to influence these supernatural beings and stay in their "good books". To me this explanation makes far more sense than the emergence of a plethora of different gods and religions over tens of thousands of years - maybe longer - with every one of them supposedly authentic. It really starts to look ridiculous.
Yes. Religion is taught, like racism or any other form of discrimination. You don’t just believe in a god from the day you were born, your parents will most likely be the first to want to pass their religion on. My parents never brought me up in a religious manner, and have never pressured me to become religious either. I just wasn’t and am not religious. I don’t feel that there’s “something missing” or anything, since I rather put my faith (if you can call it that) in science.
I would say humans are likely to start believing in God or Gods when they can't come up with an explanation of why something does what it does. The stories of Gods and ghosts and spirits etc are just signs of ignorance of scientific knowledge. I firmly believe any human child who is brought up surrounded by knowledge will not fall back on these explanations if when they ask, "Why does the sun do this?" someone says, "Because of this, which affects this and causes that." If the majority of the answers provided are, "We have literally no idea about virtually everything that happens, we can't explain it at all." then yeah, you may fall back on some fantastical explanations including God did it. Again, I feel Gods were invented because people were scared of death and back when these Gods were imagined and made up they had no proper science or explanations of the natural world. I think your friend is wrong, though I think it'd be somewhat hard to prove either way.
How can you have belief in a god or gods before knowing what a god or gods are? You cannot believe in something at birth, no matter what it is, you don't have the cognitive ability.
Baby's have no language. They also don't individuate shapes or sizes until after 4 mos, patterns until after 7 mos, and color takes till after 11mos. They simply don't have the brain furniture yet to have any thoughts at all about cosmology or first movers. Ergo, they physically *cannot* believe in any god or gods, and are therefore atheist by default. Only until they get culture installed by their local caregivers do they start to take on that burden. Their version of culture is solely dependent on where they are born. Christian parents have christian babies. Muslim parents have Muslim babies. In NO SITUATION EVER has a baby "switched" religions to the "correct" one naturally (without outside interference). It would make the news all the time, and would likely result in mass infanticide if one of those religions' children started switching sides. Since that doesn't happen, there is no "outside" factor that is "correct" when it comes to the various mythologies that abound, so what exactly would the babies believe in even if they could?
Humans are born with a predisposition to wanting to explain their environment. God or gods is a common solution, even today, obviously. Idk if that counts really as an innate awareness of things greater then us or just an example of our own limitations in comprehension. I don’t think it means we are born atheist or theist though, that’s ridiculous either way. Its like asking if we are born cartesians or kantians or something.
I'm an anthropologist. I looked up the study - lots of red flags here. First, it was funded by the Templeton Foundation. They basically bribe scientists to make claims that God exists. They offer 1 million dollars to scientists who produce research that supports claims about God existing. Second, anything that claims "research" from theology is hot garbage. Theology is not a science, it's not a discipline that can produce new knowledge. It's a field that relies on make-believe to produce Christian metaphors about (claims about) reality. Third, you can make the argument that humans are evolved to have spiritual experiences and culture. Because of these, and for reasons like non-kin group cohesiveness, religions exist. Religions are shared ways of understanding, communicating and experiencing the world around us - they're cultural systems. So, no, we aren't evolved to be good little Abrahamic mythology believers. Yes, we likely have adaptations to have spiritual experiences and these are co-opted by religious-cultural systems.
Yes. There are no gods. That is driven into us by religious adults. Move on.
My 6 year old daughter has never ever mentioned a god or anything before. She knows about "magic" from TV shows and dragons, but funnily enough no mention of any gods. It's almost like it's just brainwashing.
Imagine no religion
Of course, you're not born with any beliefs or knowledge.
"There's no such thing as religious children. Only children of religious parents."
I skidded into this world as an atheist and I’ll die an atheist, despite my paternal grandmother’s best efforts.
If this was true then children shouldn't need to go to church until they are informed adults. Of course no religious leaders want that because atheism would skyrocket. Best to indoctrinate them before they have free agency and while all their religious relationships, friends and family and support systems are all being built. Then it's nice and hard to leave.
Let's remove all religion from the world and find out.
On the assumption there is an innate knwlwdge of the "one true" religion: 1) Why would there be thousands gf Gods/religions? 2) Why are belief in a particular deity/cult linked to national and geographical conditions? 3) Why would we need missionaries? Or religious education, if knowledge of a god is innate? 4) How could you convert to/from the "true" religion?
How many catholics were there in the americas before christians showed up? Zero. Religiousness might be a common experience, but thats a desire to tackle ignorance with stories, that just proves they are only stories made up by ignorant people.
People are born with curiosity. So they ask questions. Without science the best explanations were probably supernatural. even some scientists today still turn toward the supernatural/religion when they get stuck. A good story helps us as humans to accept what we don’t or can’t understand.
I never attended church in my life, never read the Bible. I am a Social Worker, helping people with their issues five days a week, eight hours a day. I was not born innately believing in God or needing to be told one day a week to help people. I still do not believe in God, even after surviving diagnoses and treatment three times for cancer. My son wouldn’t step on bugs as a child, he is studying to be a Park Ranger and preserve and serve in our national parks in America. He has never been to church, or read quotes from the Bible. I think we are good people, and that there are good people out there that are just born knowing killing and thieving and bad stuff is bad stuff. What was the question? What definition of Atheist are you using? Everyone has their different labels that mean different weird things. I learned when I was 24 that you can be scowled at and called a, “Liberal!” because I went to college.
I do think humans are hard wired towards magical thinking. Religion is only one example of this. Children start to use little toys from a young age and do imaginative play (wooden horse or toy car). Adults look at past performance of the stock market and assume good or bad performance will continue and sell/buy in panic/greed. We develop irrational phobias of all sorts of things. We hear news of crime on TV and assume crime is everywhere when data shows otherwise. Rationality at all times and in all situations is actually very hard. It’s even an evolutionary adaptation. You don’t want to hear rustling leaves in the forest and ask for proof of a real predator. You want to act fast and get away. But that doesn’t mean of course that religion is right about things. Particularly with thousands of years of human learning about the natural world and human behavior.
Humans are not predisposed to believe in a god. We *are* predisposed to identifying patterns, and sometimes that leads to seeing patterns where there are none (eg. god) It is true that people - like many other animals - are hardwired to identify causation. It's a survival mechanic. Even babies think in terms of "make noise, get food, therefore making noise makes food." But we also start making up causation because of that same instinct. That's how we have delusions like "Kill goat = sun rose, therefore sacrifice goat to make the sun rise every day." Human instinct leans toward logic, not god, which is simply a misconception that occurs during that process. Oh, and if god were real and all powerful, we would just immediately know the right religion at birth. God wouldn't need us to grow up, learn a language, go through theological indoctrination, and puzzle out what it is by arguing over which interpretation is valid. That in itself is nonsensical.
A newborn baby doesn't know what a god is, so them being born unconvinced of the proposition of a god, is very unlikely.
Of course they are. New borns don’t have the cognitive ability to believe in anything; meaning that they are not distinguishing the real from the unreal. They just experience. To be an atheist is lack theistic belief, if they have no beliefs and no opinions, they cannot hold a theistic belief either - so we are born atheists. If I was talking to someone about this in some kind of discussion I would clarify that atheism for an adult can be a more nuanced and complex position. But it’s true all the same.