"Born Believers"

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." 

source: telegraph.co.uk | 2:54PM GMT 24 Nov 2008