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> ou are stating positively both a) that infants are born without any concept of what is commonly referred to supernatural existence and b) they are incapable of such.
I'm not sure whose post you're referring to. Can't be mine, I never said either of those things. If you can point out anything I posted that can even remotely be construed as such, let me know.
> I'm not asking you to prove it, I'm asking you what parameters of an experiment you would use to test that hypothesis.
I would ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster to design the experiment, because as we all know, thoughts don't happen from thought processes. They are injected into our brains by the Thought Creator, AKA the FSM.
Seriously, if you're in the mood for a "I can prove to you that religion is REAL" argument, look elsewhere. I started on that path when I was four years old (arguing with a Catholic priest), and ended at 17 (in college, when some religionists tried to argue with me, and their only answer to my logic-bomb question that day was "God wouldn't do that!"
. Now, I don't care if you wanna believe in something supernatural. Just don't try to make it public policy.
Right you are again, oh Seer Of The Strawmen! 
A Greek king and a Persian king got into an argument over man's "natural" language. The Greek king insisted that it was Greek, of course, and the Persian king insisted that it was Persian. So they proposed an experiment -- the kind that only kings could get away with. They took a newborn baby boy from its mother and carried him off to be raised by a hermit high in the hills, far away from any other people. The hermit -- who was a deaf-mute -- provided the baby with goat's milk and raised him to the age of twelve. At that time, the two kings stopped by to see how their experiment had turned out. When they knocked at the door of the hermit's cabin, the boy answered the door. The two kings silently glanced at each other, and then nervously waited for the boy to speak. Finally, the boy opend his mouth and gave voice to: Baaaaaaaah!
(This is a fun joke to tell, if you can do a convincing goat bleat. 
)
In the future, every time I hear a child ask "where does X come from?", or "why is X?", I'll answer "the Flying Spaghetti Monster". It is as valid as "God", and is much more appetizing.
Such interaction has been known for centuries. I mentioned the story of Emperor Barbarossa and trying to find the "Natural Language" of people and the results of that experiment. This all shows a NEED to interact with other people, and if that includes the need to worship together, babies will do so.
Furthermore, one of the aspects of the New Stone Age Culture from the older old Stone Age Culture is a larger sense of Community and a need to interact as one "tribe". This was based on old stone age culture which required each family to retain a sense of unity, but no need for any higher sense of unity. This higher sense of Unity is the primary SOCIAL difference between Old Stone age and New Stone age people. One aspect of this required a more united view of spirits and other "gods" that most primitive people used as part of how they view the world.
Our concept of God grew out of this more untied sense of how natural worked. IT was a WORKABLE explanation. It was a USABLE Explanation. In one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes Stories, Doyle had Holmes NOT knowing the Earth revolved around the sun until told by Dr Watson. Holmes said that was interesting but the work he did could be done with the assumption the Sun revolved around the earth. That theory provided all the Data he needed to solve the cases he was investigating and since the mind can only hold so much knowledge he would promptly forget what Dr Watson had told him for it was USELESS Information for the work he was doing (i.e detective work).
Doyle's purpose for that short half page exchange between Holmes and Dr Watson was to show that many of the storied of old were USABLE explanation of how nature worked, and for most people those explanation were more then adequate. Does it really matter if the earth revolved around the sun, or the sun around the earth, when all you need to know when the Sunlight from the Sun will hit the part of the earth you are on and for how long? The answer is NO. The wrong theory is perfectly usable AND if a story can be connected to it that further unites people, then the story become more important then whatever is the Scientific fact.
People want as many people as possible to be "US" not "Them" and if to create more "US" requires embracing the ideas of others as our own we will do so. This includes the belief in God. Some people will reject this need to embrace what other's embrace, but most people will tend embrace what others in their network of friends embrace. That is human nature.
This is complicated by another factor in being human, the need to embrace ideas. When facing a choice, we will tend to embrace the idea that is SOMETHING as oppose to its negation. I first ran across this concept when studying the ratification process of the US Constitution. When the US Constitution was first proposed, it was OPPOSED by the majority of Americas. If it had been put up to a vote, most historian believed it would have been voted down. Then why was it passed? The people who opposed it were adamant that it was an attack on American Liberties. They mistake was NOT proposing an alternative, given the situation the American People had a choice, the US Constitution or nothing. Given that choice the American People ended up ratifying the US Constitution do to it being the ONLY Positive Choice. Had the opposition actually come up with a PLAN to improve the Articles of Confederation, the American People would have embraced that plan over the US Constitution, but the opposition never came up with an actual alternative, just a call for its rejection. Given a choice between a positive choice and a rejection of that choice, people by their nature will embrace the positive choice, even if they hate it.
This same part of Human Nature kicks in with the concept of "God". Atheists keep on attacking the concept, but by their very nature can NOT come up with an alternative (and vague terms like "Reason","Logic" etc are NOT alternatives, they are REJECTIONS of the concept of "GOD" . Most people, by their nature, will reject rejection and embrace a positive concept every time. Thus the concept of "God" survives and given the above two aspects of human nature is a concept hard to defeat. Thus the Concept of "God" may be "Hard wired" in our brains more as an aspect of our need to embrace concepts of our network of friends AND out need to embrace positive concepts over rejections of those concepts.
I suspect these are two of the concepts the author is trying to write about, the desire to embrace positive concepts AND to embrace the concepts of our network of Friends (The concept of "US" against the concept of "THEM" and thus the concept of God is a strong concept within our collective human data base and given that strong position within our collective human data base a very hard concept NOT to embrace.
child development is pretty universal, and falls within a certain predictive bell curve of possible growth and development milestones.
Children, even fetuses in the womb, acclimate their hearing to the sound of their mother's voice. So, after birth, they pay attention to their birth mother over other voices they hear. This is science, not wishful thinking, several experiments on newborn infants show that infants turn more toward the sound of their own biological mother's voice than toward fathers, or other women's voices, even other women who have recently given birth.
There's studies of when infants focus, when they clearly see a mother's face as opposed to other faces. There is evidence that what key words infants hear are the words they respond to with smiles or glances, or laughter.
All of this is cumulative. It takes over a year before babies start to recognize words strung together as having meaning... "want drink?", "want more food?", "want go byebye?"
bedtime), etc. Childrend learn to associate words with their primal bodiliy functions, (eating sleeping,eliminating, etc.) before they learn any abstract concepts of more or less, good or bad, God or Satan.
This author wrote a book in response to evolutionary biologist, atheist, Richard Dawkins, with whom he obviously disagrees, so this guy is writing a book without any clear clinical discovery or repeatable "evidence" to go along with his "theory".
Let's talk about babies having "strong, cognitively driven propensity for" language, sucking, gumming, eating,reaching out, crying, babbling, etc. Those things are observable, replicatable, and universal.
So, leaving Sherock Holmes askide, (a total fictional character, by a fiction author), let's discuss where there is actual replicatable "EVIDENCE" of babies having a "strong, cognitively driven propensity for religious belief “preinstalled”.
Got anything? Does that author?
