People Are Born with Religious Belief Argues New Book

[LeftishBrit]

64. To interrupt the conversation here...

I may be the one person on this thread who actually does research in developmental psychology, though not with regard to religion. It is possible to get children to take part in studies; the ethics of this involves two parts: you must get informed consent from a parent, and you must never press a child, even mildly, to begin or continue to take part if they don't want to. In my experience most young children are quite keen to do tasks, answer questions, or play games with the researcher.

Some factors are relatively easy to control; e.g. making sure that any two comparison groups are matched for age and gender. Others are not. For example, finding children in the UK, let alone the USA, who have never heard of God is basically impossible. And yes, bringing up a child in such isolation that they were not exposed to the concept would be most unethical The only way to do a somewhat controlled study would be through cross-cultural research - and even there, there are very few cultures that have no exposure to any form of religion; it might be more a matter of looking for differences between monotheistic, polytheistic and nontheistic religions.