Born Believers

The Science of Children's Religious Belief

Justin L. Barrett

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439196571
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Psicologia della religione

Infants have a lot to make sense of in the world: Why does the sun shine and night fall; why do some objects move in response to words, while others won't budge; who is it that looks over them and cares for them? How the developing brain grapples with these and other questions leads children, across cultures, to naturally develop a belief in a divine power of remarkably consistent traits––a god that is a powerful creator, knowing, immortal, and good—explains noted developmental psychologist and anthropologist Justin L. Barrett in this enlightening and provocative book. In short, we are all born believers. Belief begins in the brain. Under the sway of powerful internal and external influences, children understand their environments by imagining at least one creative and intelligent agent, a grand creator and controller that brings order and purpose to the world. Further, these beliefs in unseen super beings help organize children's intuitions about morality and surprising life events, making life meaningful. Summarizing scientific experiments conducted with children across the globe, Professor Barrett illustrates the ways human beings have come to develop complex belief systems about God's omniscience, the afterlife, and the immortality of deities. He shows how the science of childhood religiosity reveals, across humanity, a "natural religion, " the organization of those beliefs that humans gravitate to organically, and how it underlies all of the world's major religions, uniting them under one common source. For believers and nonbelievers alike, Barrett offers a compelling argument for the human instinct for religion, as he guides all parents in how to effectively encourage children in developing a healthy constellation of beliefs about the world around them.

PART ONE

The Evidence

ONE

Secret Agents Everywhere

IF YOU ever visit Oxford, and I hope you will, I recommend that once you finish walking beside the dreaming spires and ancient college quads you visit the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the site of the university’s anthropological collection. A visit to the Pitt-Rivers will make you feel as if you are rummaging through humanity’s attic.

A popular exhibit with the nonsqueamish is a glass case labeled “Treatment of Dead Enemies.” Inside are mummified and shrunken heads, some with sharpened sticks and crude blades stuck through them. A neighboring case houses scores of beautiful and grotesque figurines, many part human–part animal, some with multiple limbs. As you continue wandering, you will find additional strange items from all over the world: bug-eyed voodoo dolls, hand-carved amulets, and tiny coffins holding mummified cats. What ties many disparate items together, including Oxford’s famous dreaming spires, is religion: each of these unique, occasionally bizarre exhibits has a religious significance in the culture they come from. They are visual reminders of the diverse and nearly ubiquitous presence of belief in gods across times and cultures.

The vast majority of cultures, as well as the vast majority of people, believes in some sort of god or gods. If we count as gods all willful beings with some special property that humans or animals do not have (such as being invisible, immortal, or made of bronze), belief in gods has occurred in every age and in every culture. So many cultures are religious that religion of some sort seems to be a natural human expression.1

Similarly, almost everyone, no matter their culture or the beliefs of their parents, goes through a period of affirming the existence of one or more supernatural beings. Perhaps you have a childhood memory like this:

The scene is a children’s sleepover, and the parents have turned off the lights and gone to bed. Tired but excited kids try to frighten each other with whispered macabre stories until one child knowingly asks, “Do you want to see a real ghost?” Everyone falls silent for a moment, and then one cocksure kid says, “Yeah. How?” “All you have to do is go into the bathroom alone with the lights out, close the door, and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times. Then she’ll come to you in the mirror. But you’d better get out fast or she’ll kill you!”

Many children have tried it and many have seen her—or at least think they have seen her. Others refuse to even try. Some of the special beings children believe in are imaginary friends, others are scary ghosts and monsters, some are benevolent Santa and elves, and many are what adults recognize as spirits or gods—the kind of beings that are part of shared religious systems.

TWO WAYS OF BEING NATURAL

Some ways of thinking or acting are so automatic to us, so easy, so fluent, that we can’t imagine not having them. In fact, it is almost impossible for us to imagine a person growing up and not learning certain abilities. The word we use for this is natural. Philosopher Robert McCauley calls this kind of naturalness maturational naturalness to emphasize that it comes about as a normal part of growing up and maturing.2 Learning to walk is maturationally natural. Understanding that you have to touch a solid object to make it move (as in picking up a coffee cup) is maturationally natural. Developmental psychology tells us that using your native language, recognizing family members’ faces, and adding single-digit numbers are maturationally natural in McCauley’s sense. We usually acquire these maturationally natural abilities so early in life that, as adults, we do not remember not having them. People the world over have them because these abilities do not require special training, explicit instruction, or special tools or other artifacts to acquire.

In contrast, we get some abilities through special training, instruction, using special tools, and lots and lots of practice. Consider riding a bike. Once you’ve mastered riding a bicycle, your body seems to just know how to do it. You don’t have to think about it—to consciously remember how to balance, steer, and control a bicycle’s speed. You just do it. But you remember how difficult, scary, and frustrating it was to learn how to ride a bicycle. I remember wearing a motorcycle helmet to protect myself from repeated crashes on the gravel driveway and into trees and hedges, my dad giving me direct instructions about how to ride and helping me get started. At one point, it was not so automatic, not so natural.

Years of practice, instruction, and correction yield practiced naturalness, as McCauley terms it. Effortless driving of a car, mastery of algebra, and reading are all cases of practiced naturalness. If you do not get instruction and practice a lot, you do not acquire mastery, and lots of perfectly intelligent and capable people never do acquire mastery of these. Special cultural conditions are required for this kind of naturalness.

McCauley uses the term naturalness to refer to both classes of capabilities because we find them easy, automatic, and fluent. I do not have to concentrate to read a road sign. If I see one, I read it automatically. Likewise, I usually do not have to do any careful concentrating to put a sentence together when I speak to someone. Both reading and speaking seem natural in the sense of being easy and automatic. But this apparent similarity masks a hidden difference. Speaking is essentially inevitable for us as normally developing humans. Parents do not tell us how to speak and give us special speaking tools or lessons; they just speak around us, and we pick it up naturally. Reading, however, is not inevitable. Something special—a writing system, printed words, instruction, and lots of conscious, deliberate practice—must be added to ordinary natural language skills to get literacy.

I will break from McCauley’s terminology and refer to the nearly inevitable capacities, thoughts, and practices as natural traits or nature and those that require special conditions, training, or practice as expert traits or expertise. We are natural language users but have to acquire expertise in reading and writing. Walking is natural, but doing ballet requires expertise.

This use of nature (versus expertise) tracks closely to common use and carries the additional benefit of allowing for some ideas, practices, or competencies to be more or less natural. Being able to add 1 + 1 might be fully natural, and adding larger sums might be mostly natural, but doing calculus is very unnatural. And many basic religious thoughts and practices are on the natural end of the continuum, while the religious thought and practice as we see in adults certainly involves a degree of expertise overlaid on a solidly natural foundation.

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that for an ability to be natural, it must be somehow built into our biology from birth, or hardwired into our brains. Popular news stories about genes for anything from disease resistance to hair color to intelligence reinforce this misunderstanding. But just because we have a biological disposition toward a trait does not mean it will develop without the right kind of environment, and just because something is not built in does not mean it is not nearly inevitable as a part of human development. What we can more sensibly say is that given a certain kind of biological endowment and the ordinary sort of world we are typically born into, we will typically develop certain properties and attributes. These sorts of traits—those that are almost inevitable because of our biology plus the regular sorts of environments people grow up in—are natural traits. We can leave the “hardwired” talk to electricians.

Belief in gods of some sort or other, and maybe a supreme capital G God in particular, may be largely natural in this sense: biology plus ordinary environment, no special cultural conditions required, a predictable expression of our biology’s development in a normal environment—but not be biologically determined.

Exciting new research points to just those systems of the human mind that make us born believers. For the next several chapters, I identify these early-developing systems and explain how they make belief in some kind of god almost inevitable. Children are not susceptible to religious thought because they do not yet know the way the world works. Rather, they have strong propensities to believe in gods because gods occupy a sweet spot in their natural way of thinking: gods are readily and easily accommodated by children’s minds and fill some naturally occurring conceptual gaps rather nicely. There are specific early-developing mental systems that undergird childhood religious belief. And the mental system that divides the world into those things that act from those things that can only be acted on is one of the foundations of being a born believer.

SEPARATING WHO? FROM WHAT?

Fantastical films like the Harry Potter movies or Bedknobs and Broomsticks fire up the imagination and give children all sorts of ideas, not the least of which is the delicious whimsy that children might be able to get furniture to fly, or even sing and dance, by casting a magic spell. Maybe we can use the Force to move objects the way a Star Wars Jedi does. Captivated by the events of a magic-filled movie, a child might try to get ordinary inanimate objects such as beds, books, chairs, stones, and trees to move around or change shape by talking to them, persuading them, or ordering them. But soon he will learn that no matter how much he tries, he cannot move objects through the power of mind alone.

A similar lesson is that to get people to move, it is best to ask them rather than attempting to get them to act through physical contact, pokes, prods, shoves, and punches. The difference between a chest of drawers and Uncle Billy is the difference between an inanimate object and a being that has intention and purpose. A cupboard will not move unless someone pushes it or makes it move, whereas Grandma can walk in and out of the room whenever she wants.

Fortunately, children from infancy show signs that they know the basics of how things work in the world. Ordinary objects do not launch without being touched, magically teleport from one place to another, or simply vanish from existence.3 Children find magical tales delightful precisely because they know the world does not really work that way. We know babies already have a pretty good grasp on how bedknobs and broomsticks really behave from ingenious techniques that experimental psychologists have developed over the past thirty years for peering into the minds of babies.

To see what babies have learned about the world by a particular age, we need to perform experiments on them to see if they are surprised when things do not work out the way they are supposed to. Because babies cannot directly tell us and surprise can be hard to measure (What would the unit be—the gasp or gurgle?), scientists use changes in how long a baby looks at something as an indicator of interest or surprise. If a baby has been looking at a display and gotten bored, she will let you know by looking away, squirming, and fussing—sort of like adults do when they are bored. But, if something new or surprising is then presented, the baby gets interested again and gives the new display a good, long look. You can almost read the surprise on their faces.

One characteristic experiment was conducted by developmental psychologist Renée Baillargeon and colleagues.4 Baillargeon’s team showed two-and-a-half-month-old babies a cylinder rolling down a ramp and then coming to a halt when it struck small fixed objects dubbed stoppers. Nothing strange or surprising here: any object in motion will come to a stop if an obstacle blocks it.

Once babies were tired of looking at this event, or habituated (as measured by looking away from the display), the experimenters presented a slightly changed display: a toy bug on wheels at the bottom of the ramp. Sometimes this toy was placed a small distance away from the stoppers so that the rolling cylinder would not strike it, and so the toy did not get launched. Other times, experimenters placed the toy right next to the stoppers in a way such that the rolling cylinder would strike the toy. But the toy bug still did not launch into motion. From an adult perspective, this appeared to be a surprising violation of the way physics works. But would these two-and-a-half-month-olds have similar expectations? The experimenters found that the babies looked significantly longer at the display in which the toy should have been launched but was not. This finding suggests that just like adults, babies expect objects to move if another object collides with them. So two-month-olds appreciate that physical contact can launch an object. Other experiments have shown that babies also know that ordinary objects (not agents) do not launch themselves.5

Experiments like these give developmental psychologists confidence that five-month-olds (and perhaps even younger babies) “know” that blocks, balls, shoes, and toys have to be contacted in order to start moving, and that when they are contacted by a moving object, they tend to move. A large body of experimental evidence demonstrates that infants in the first five months of life know a lot about the core properties of common solid objects.6 A baby who sees a shoe knows that the shoe moves together as a whole, bounded object; knows that it must move on a continuous, unobstructed path (instead of jumping from one place to another or passing through solid objects); and knows that it must be physically contacted—pushed by something else—in order to move. Later in the first year, babies show awareness that objects must be supported to keep from falling. These may sound like mundane achievements, but they are of critical importance, as they structure the physical world and make navigation and interaction with the world possible. They also help establish what happens due to ordinary causation versus supernatural causation. By supernatural here, I mean violating our natural expectations.

If as a baby I did not know that solid objects cannot pass through one another, I might try to walk through a closed door instead of opening it first, or I might try to reach through a cupboard door to get a toy. If I did not understand that physical objects require support, I might place my cup of juice in midair expecting it to hover. If I did not know that ordinary objects have to be contacted to be moved, I might never learn physical cause-and-effect relations such as when a rolling ball knocks over a vase or a bumped chair falls. I might also attempt to move objects without physically contacting them but by gesturing or talking to them or thinking about them, or I might have no idea how to move them and give up altogether. This collection of principles that we automatically use to think about physical objects has been termed naive physics—a bit like ordinary physics but a lot simpler and more natural, something we do not need to be taught.

So experiments with babies tell us that babies expect ordinary objects to behave in the ordinary ways we adults expect them to behave. Babies would find flying beds and brooms surprising. Further experiments, however, give us reason to think that babies make an exception for humans and other agents, distinguishing between the doers and the done-tos, the whos and the whats. They know that the regular rules of the world do not apply to the whos.

The difference between inanimate objects and beings called agents is a critical one for children to master, and the failure to do so—such as in the failure to know the difference between a boulder and a bear—can be life threatening. By agents I mean to include people and any other beings we understand as not merely reacting to their environment but intentionally acting on it. People or human beings are not the only agents children think about or interact with. Dogs, cats, and other animals might be considered agents. Computers, too. Ghosts and space aliens would be agents. Gods are agents, whether they are sacrifice-hungry volcanoes, w...