I had written a bit more than four or five long paragraphs as my personal reaction to an article I've just read on the latest issue of New Scientist but I was forced to delete everything as it turned out to be as awful and rambling a piece of writing as the article itself. I'm not usually that picky about it, but the more I read it, the more I think it is a confusing article, mixing - perhaps intentionally - things up.
It goes from claiming we have an inborn inclination to believe in the metaphysical to also claiming that there are no adaptive advantages in religion and belief. Unfortunately it forgets to explain how abstract beliefs have "permeated every human society" and survived this long without having been selected for together with their social construct-counterparts, religions. If Paul Bloom and Scott Atran's claim is really that belief in the supernatural is a natural trait resulting from "unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species" which also "work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking," but that "a belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes," I'd love to see them try and explain how a trait can survive this long and being this pervasive without having been selected for. However hurtful it might be to me as an atheist to admit such a thing, religion does have its odd evolutionary advantages, and that's the only reason why faith still plagues our world today. For one, most religions have some sort of prohibition or regulation concerning self-inflicted death. Sure, the occasional religion will go as far as to reward death under certain circumstances, but luckily enough such strict religious observance is still limited in rate. Furthermore, it is fairly obvious that religions guarantee social cohesion amongst those who share a common belief, increasing stability and resulting in a clear evolutionary advantage. Also, has Scott Atran never heard the tenet "be fruitful and multiply"? Many religious regulations - ban on adultery and even religious tenets being the basis for civil and penal codes - no matter how narrow-minded in today's social context, are indeed aimed at ensuring some degree of stability within families, so as to make sure that the offspring can be raised relatively safely. Makes one wonder where Scott Atran found his degree. Cereal box? Plus, "unique cognitive capacities" must overlie neurological - and hence at least party genetic - elements. Unless, of course, we posit the existence of an unproven mind or soul and claim that goddidit.
However, following a long tradition of similar - and equally (self-)contradicting - articles, this one just can't but bring children under the spotlight once more. Apparently:
There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existing others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners.
By any chance, am I the only one the two statements above give the creeps to? I, for one, have never had an imaginary friend - except for during the few years I was raised as a church goer and assumed god was real because everyone else around me did. And by all means I certainly don't have any sort of relationship with dead relatives of mine, fictional characters or fantasy partners (the odd fantasy about this or that Hollywood start doesn't count...). What the article describes - except for the part concerning kids' imaginary friends, a fairly common phenomenon and relatively harmless in most cases - are clear signs of schizophrenia.
The following, obvious step in the article is to give an appearance of scientificity to the whole thing by quoting some experiment allegedly proving that children are naturally prone to building a teleological view of the world. Yeah, I'm talking about Deborah Kelemen and her experiments. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Deborah Kelemen is a psychologist working at the Child Cognition Laboratory at Boston University. According to the author of the article:
When Deborah Kelemen [...] asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music," while rivers exist so boats have something to float on.
However, reality is a tad different. Quoting from one of Kelemen's publications:
Analyses of the individual tasks to this point can be summarized as follows: Across age groups, children’s clearest intuitions about origins occurred with artifacts and natural events, with both purpose and design seen as highly relevant to explaining artifacts (which children view as humanmade) but somewhat irrelevant to explaining natural events (which children view as having physical–causal antecedents).
Children’s explanations for animals and nonliving natural objects fall somewhere between these poles but although Year 2 and Year 5 children had an equivalently strong tendency to generate artifact-like teleofunctional ideas when answering open-ended origins questions about animals and natural objects, it was younger children who showed more pronounced teleofunctional and intelligent design intuitions in closed-ended tasks. For example, Year 2 children were more likely to actively endorse teleofunctional over physical causal accounts when explaining natural objects and were more likely to endorse intelligent design rather than nondesign when explaining animals.
In the case of Year 5 children, the shift from being likely to generate teleofunctional explanations of animals and natural objects in an open-ended task, to then becoming ambivalent or eschewing them in the closed-ended origins-teleology task, potentially reflects children’s increasing scientific knowledge base—physical–causal response options probably triggered children’s latent knowledge of popular scientific explanations that they have not yet mastered enough to generate for themselves. There is some evidence, then, that older children’s reasoning undergoes some form of transition around 9 to 10 years of age as they increasingly retain and elaborate physical–causal explanations that are alternatives to teleofunctional and design explanations of the biological and nonbiological natural world.
I apologise for the long quote, but it was necessary. For those who can't be bothered to read through it all, I'll sum it up for you. What Kelemen is saying is that - surprise surprise - kids grow up. Yep. Two-year-olds are more likely than five-year-olds - and five-year-olds more likely than nine or ten-year-olds - to resort to teleofunctional arguments to explain the biological and non-biological natural world - e.g. birds exist to make nice music and they were created by god, rain exists so that we can have water and plants can grow and rain is sent by god. That's it. The oh so revolutionary discovery made by Deborah Kelemen is that as kids grow up and acquire deeper scientific knowledge of how the physical, natural world works they will progressively leave teleological - and theological - arguments behind
unless imprinted to do so by their social environment (e.g. family, school, community).
Then the article "leaves them kids alone" to focus on adults and how, supposedly, they find it overwhelmingly difficult or even impossible to jettison their religious, superstitious beliefs and are bound to fall back into them whenever difficulties strike. Now, while that might be true of some, even many, people, that in no way means that religious belief is inborn, for the reasons I have just explained. It simply means that childhood imprinting might be harder to overcome for some than it is for others, something I can totally agree with. Harder but by no means impossible. Therefore, the claim that "god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the 'path of least resistence' [...] while disbelief requires effort," is bollocks, as proven by the overwhelming number of atheists who tread happily though their godless existence. I'm one of them. Atheism was never a "hard sell" to me, rather the obvious solution to the cognitive dissonance that learning more about the world had caused in me as it conflicted with my previous upbringing. Disbelief requires no effort, only curiosity and a bit of opennes.