Religion
In reply to the discussion: People Are Born with Religious Belief Argues New Book [View all]LeftishBrit
(41,205 posts)Certainly, children are not born with any particular sort of religious belief, or we'd all have the same religion. It needs to be remembered that though most of the world has some sort of religion, not all religions believe in a single God; many are polytheistic; some are non-theistic, e.g. ancestor worship. So it's unlikely that we're pre-programmed to believe in a single God.
What a lot of research, as well as personal observation, does indicate is that children (a) tend to look for causes of events ("Mummy, why is the sky blue?'; and (b) tend to reason in a somewhat concrete way, rather than to think in very abstract terms. Thus, complex concepts of time and space and causation are even more difficult for children than for their elders. If something exists, then somebody made it! In particular, children are inclined to think in anthropomorphic terms: the sun gets up because it wants to; that naughty table hit me on purpose! Judging from the number of adults who scold their computers, I am not sure that this stage is ever fully outgrown.
Personal example: At the age of around four, I asked my mother 'Why do we have night?' (on the basis that if we didn't have night, I wouldn't have to go to bed!) My atheist mother replied, 'Well, nature made it.' I concluded that there was a very nasty man called Nature somewhere, and that if I ever met him I would tell him off for this most regrettable invention of night!
Thus, if children have heard of God, and most children have in Europe, they will at times invoke God as a cause. This does not prove the existence of God, any more than children's tendency also to believe in magic proves the existence of magic. (On the other hand, of course it doesn't disprove it.