Born to believe

«   Part 10 of the series, Genesis for the rest of us   »

This Mayan mask unites at once the human, the animal, and the artifact. Source: Museo Popul Vuh, Guatemala City

Religion appears to be a human universal. Across time and space, human beings have been religious. Efforts to crush religion fail, often spectacularly. Justin Barrett's account of the psychology of religious belief, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, is as persuasive as it is readable. Among other things, Barrett observes that the psychological components of agency detection -- particularly face, animal, and artifact identification -- emerge very early in childhood. From our earliest days, we know how to distinguish humans from other living things and to observe and respect boundaries between the quick, the dead, and the inanimate.

Evolutionary psychology sheds light on child development and the acquisition of what something that comes close to being a religious instinct in humans:

• Children appear on their own to visualize a divine creator who is omniscient, superperceptive, immortal, and superpowerful. See Justin L. Barrett & Rebekah A. Richert, Anthropomorphism or Preparedness?: Exploring Children’s God Concepts, 44 Rev. Relig. 300-12 (2003). Thanks to this instinct, children naturally embrace many of the theological tenets that typify the Abrahamic traditions.


• According to the work of Olivera Petrovich, children sharply distinguish between natural and human-made things. Children also ascribe natural origins to theistic rather than human agency.


• Children see living and nonliving things as purposeful, and religion may merely confirm this instinct. See Deborah Kelemen. Function, Goals and intention: Children’s Teleological Reasoning About Objects, 3 Trends in Cognitive Scis. 461-67 (1999).


• Children devote extraordinary effort to mastering information about animals, even those that are extinct. Animals are at once resources and threats. See H. Clark Barrett, Cognitive development and the understanding of animal behavior, in Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development (Bruce J. Ellis & David F. Bjorklund eds., 2004).


• Deborah Kelemen has written at least one article speculating whether children carry over thei intuitive sense of theology into other realms of thought and learning. See generally Are Children "Intuitive Theists"? Reasoning About Purpose and Design in Nature, 15 Psych. Sci. 295 (2004).

When it comes to religious belief, Saint Paul -- perhaps unwittingly -- stated the developmental origins of faith as an expression of child psychology: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I knew as a child, I thought as a child." 1 Corinthians 13:11. The question is what to make of the next line in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: "But when I grew up, I put away childish things."

Next in this series: Avant moi, le déluge.