Religion
In reply to the discussion: People Are Born with Religious Belief Argues New Book [View all]SamG
(535 posts)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?