One argument I’ve been hearing about with increasing frequency from the atheist community is that “everyone is born atheist” with the implication that religion is some unwitting indoctrination forced upon children too young to object. To me, such an argument represents a shockingly naive tabula rasa view of human development and, what’s more, invalidates the significant intellectual achievements of atheism as an intellectual stance.
A far more accurate view of human development would reveal that “everyone is born animist”, that is, ascribing human like traits to naturalistic phenomena. Our propensity to find and explain patterns of behavior is a product of our deep evolutionary background and even in modern, technological society, we curse our computers as malicious and believe that we can influence the timing of traffic lights. All religion does is impose an organizational framework upon our original animist intuitions. It provides a ready explanation for what we were already pre-programmed to believe.
Only atheism seeks to directly challenge the validity of our animist intuition and promote a wholly naturalistic view of the world. As a result, atheism is a deeply counter intuitive claim and one which can only be justified by deep intellectual inquiry into rationalism, skepticism and the scientific method. The argument that “everyone is born atheist” wholly discredits the significant intellectual effort that atheists must take to reach an intellectually defensible point of view.
So let’s retire this tired old canard that “everyone is born atheist”. It’s intellectually embarrassing and gives a grossly inaccurate viewpoint to outsiders on what atheism actually is.
Seriously though, all the evidence points to the fact that religious thinking is natural to humans and that atheism must be arrived at by scientific thinking, not as a natural development people are indoctrinated out of.
The desire to understand and have things explained is natural to humans. Both religion and the scientific method are results of that desire and curiosity. Religion predates the scientific method, but that does not make it more logically valid.
I’d agree that your phrasing is technically more accurate, but it isn’t very meaningful. You might as well look at the proverb, “A camel never sees its own hump.”, and say, “Well, technically speaking it will every time it sees its own reflection in a pool of water.” That’s not the point.
People are indoctrinated into religion. Sure we’d naturally be illiterate imbeciles running around in the forest and living in caves if we grew up naturally and without intervention, but we’ve invented language and rational inquiry and all that fun stuff since paleolithic man. Those aren’t natural, but I don’t think anyone would argue that imbuing someone with them is indoctrination.
Sage Rat, I can’t figure out who you’re arguing with. Me or VI?
I have to admit I didn’t read Shalmanese’s OP closely enough and I took it to be an argument against atheism in general. I’ve never used that particular argument myself; on the surface of it though I think “Nobody is born religious” would be a better argument, if you wanted to resort to that approach at all.
Atheism means “without theistic beiefs.” No one is born with theistic beliefs (or any other beliefs), therefore, yep, everybody is born atheist. Atheism is not a belief, it’s an absence of belief.
The argument around “everyone is born atheist” is that it’s only due to religious indoctrination that people are religious and if we could just prevent people from this evil indoctrination, they would be atheist like me. I argue that this is factually incorrect and that if we removed the religious indoctrination, people would be animists.
Instead, I think it’s far more effective for atheists to acknowledge just how deeply counterintuitive and unnatural atheism is as a position and to stop trying to pretend atheism is the default state.
People are what their parents are. That’s the natural state including child rearing. 99% of people are what their parents are, religious or non.
Atheists, though, are arguably not indoctrinated. They aren’t raised to not believe in gods, they just aren’t ever raised to believe and as a side-effect of learning logic and deduction through their education, lose their natural animism (for the most part.)
Let me try to understand where you’re coming from, here. Are you an atheist that has issues with the way other atheists argue their position, or are you a religious person who is trying to tell the other side how to argue?
I agree - we’re clearly born with some faulty wiring that might cause us to form animist beliefs later in life in the absence both of religious indoctrination and education in the sciences, but I don’t see that that’s the same as being born animist. It would seem that we’re born without belief, ie atheist.
To be technically technically accurate, we don’t even have animistic tendencies. What we do have is an imagination and an overactive need to find patterns in life, even when there may be none.
My view is everyone is conceived believing and knowing God and His Love. It is an indelible memory that acts as a beacon that is designed to draw us to God. As the Love of God becomes hidden, we seek out the next best thing we can find, the love from the mother, which is the only person we can connect with unless there are other siblings in the womb. This love draws us from the secret places in depths of the earth (Ps 139:15), into the body that God is knitting together in the womb (Ps 139:13).
As we integrate into the body, we have to learn how to use it, how to think inside it, and often lose sight of the initial encounter with God, though the memory of His Love is there, it becomes distant. At birth, most of us, are in the ways of the flesh, which is the ways of man, only with a very distant memory of God.
So in a way I would agree that, though at conception we know God, most of us at birth have forgotten Him and are just operating in a human level.
But there’s more to science than the scientific method. Did the first Homo habilis who made stone tools* have religious beliefs? We’ll probably never know, but that creature was, in some sense, doing science when he or she made those tools.
*to pick a somewhat arbitrary starting point, but one that is commonly accepted as a critical milestone in our evolution
You have deleted the 2 scriptural cites I have included in your quote. If you are going to disregard the Word of God, how would you believe the word of man about God.
