Episode Details

For years, people have argued that our minds’ natural default position is non-belief. Left to ourselves, we would never grow up thinking about God.

Religion is, therefore, an imposition on the susceptible minds of children. Some have suggested that teaching kids about God comes close to a form of brain washing.

Our guest for this episode, Justin Barrett, says that is actually getting harder to argue.

Research from the last 20 years indicates that thoughts about God aren’t by-products of American or Western culture. It’s not indoctrination. These thoughts are natural.

Believing that someone - not something - governs the world comes as easily to kids as curiosity, imagination and play. 

Special thanks to Zondervan Academic, our show sponsor, publishers of How NOT to read the Bible, by Dan Kimball.

LINKS

• Find out more about our guest Professor Justin L Barrett.
• Get Professor Barrett’s book, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief
• More on Ludwig Feuerbach and his ideas on religion as “wish fulfillment’
• Watch more of comedy trio Just These Please here.
• Read more about Sigmund Freud’s views on religion in this New York Times Magazine piece called 'Defender of the Faith'.
• Professor Barrett is a big fan of Deborah Keleman’s work from Boston University. Find out more about Keleman, here.
  • And read this article from New Scientist about one of Keleman’s studies from 2009, 'Humans may be primed to believe in creation'.
  • And this article from American Pscyhological Association titled ‘A Reason to Believe’
  • Keleman’s findings about children in China who endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena can be found in the May 2017 Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
• What in the world does ‘teleological’ mean? It’s an explanation by reference to some purpose, end, goal or function. So, a teleological explanation is an account of a given thing’s purpose. Check out this explanation on Britannica.
• Keleman, with other researchers, has only completed studies on whether non-religious adults have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being. They conducted research in Finland (a notoriously secular country) and the US and compared results. Read the report here.
• How the Borks Became: An Adventure in Evolution by Jonathan Emmett
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
• The Atlantic interviewed Philip Pullman about His Dark Mate