Media – Art Linkletter

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Art Linkletter from the legendary 1960s TV spot, Kids Say The Darndest Things, which is all about how children see the world – in this case, how they see God. For years, people have argued that the natural default position is non-belief. Left to themselves, kids would never grow up thinking about God. Religion is an imposition on their susceptible minds, perhaps even a form of brainwashing. But that’s getting harder to argue. Research from the last 20 years indicates that thoughts about God aren’t by-products of American or Western culture. They are natural. Believing that someone – not something – governs the world comes as easily to kids as … play, imagination, and curiosity. I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Justin Barrett:
Here, we have people throughout the ages and across cultures who have thought about gods and ghosts and spirits and rituals and things. And psychology has had a little bit to say, but not enough. And I think I’m fundamentally sort of a, an intellectually lazy person. So I thought, Oh, you know, I’ll go into an area that doesn’t have too much literature that I have to read. Um, so that’s kind of how I stumbled into it.

John Dickson (Studio)

Professor Justin Barrett is an American experimental psychologist who was the Director of the Thrive Centre for Human Development in California, the Professor of Psychology at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. He was also a senior researcher and director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind, and the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. He’s also the author of Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. It’s a fascinating account of the worldwide research over the last couple of decades, which has found that children are predisposed towards a belief in God. The findings – which we’ll discuss in a moment – seem to overturn centuries of received wisdom in philosophy and psychology. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” His key thought was that religion was just a kind of coping mechanism – a way finding meaning and hope amidst our sense of alienation. He believed it just created another kind of alienation – one where we surrender our own goals and aspirations to some imaginary monarch in the sky. This psychologising about religion was all the rage in this period. Around the same time, the German philosopher wrote his ‘Essence of Christianity’, where he described religion as a wish-fulfilment. We long for a benevolent guide to life and then satisfy that longing by imagining there is an omnipotent being we call God. This set the stage for the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who painted religion as an expression of our deep, unresolved search for parental care. We want a mummy-daddy in the sky, and we find it in God. Smart people in Freud’s day replied that perhaps his atheism was just a projection of his rejection of his own overbearing father! 

Media – ‘Just These Please’ skit

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s a little tongue-in-cheek poke at Freud from the comedy trio ‘Just These Please’ (we’ll put a link in the show notes). But it makes the point that Freud believed that much of who we are emerges from our subconscious. And religious beliefs are no exception – in fact they’re a mild mental illness reflecting some of our deepest unmet needs. 

John Dickson: 
Hey when people think of psychology of religion, they, uh, think of Sigmund Freud and, uh, the impression he has left that, that religion is really, uh, a neurosis. Um, and, uh, that seems to have influenced, uh, my impression is that it’s influenced a lot of psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong, but what influence does that view of religion as a neurosis or a defect, or how influential is that in psychology today?

Justin Barrett: 
You know, I think you are correct that, uh, that legacy from Freud sort of has its echoes today. So psychologists who really haven’t studied there, haven’t looked carefully at it, by default sort of assume that there’s something pathological here. Um, those who have been studying it though, uh, more rigorously, more attentively have recognized that there are lots of different ways to study religious expression. And certainly religion as pathology has not been among the more productive ways of, of doing it.

John Dickson (Studio)

‘Pathology’, of course, is the study of the causes and effects of diseases or injuries. Describing religion as pathological is to put it in the category of an illness. It’s psychological name-calling. And it’s pretty effective. 

Justin Barrett: 
You know, I think you are correct that, uh, that legacy from Freud sort of has its echoes today. So psychologists who really haven’t studied there, haven’t looked carefully at it, by default sort of assume that there’s something pathological here. Um, those who have been studying it though, uh, more rigorously, more attentively have recognized that there are lots of different ways to study religious expression. And certainly religion as pathology has not been among the more productive ways of, of doing it. Um, it, it’s sort of the height of arrogance to assume that the majority of people around the world are sort of pathological because they have these sorts of beliefs. Um, that’s sort of on its face that should at least give us pause. It would be surprising to have central point spread pathology. Um, but you’re right. It still remains for the default position.

John Dickson: 
Tell me about the growing body of research suggesting that children are naturally inclined toward religious belief.

Justin Barrett: 
Yeah, sure. The basic idea here is if religious thought is so widespread or, you know, thought we might deem religious then, uh, and it seems to at least they’re sort of anecdotal, uh, cases and people’s impressions that it comes to children very easily. Um, then we should see kind of toe holds if you use a sort of a climbing metaphor or a fertile ground, if you want an agricultural metaphor in childhood – why is it that children just find it so easy to think about? And, and the way we approach this is looking at basic, um, psychological mechanisms, uh, basic ways about the way human minds develop that are ordinary parts of just how kids grow up in a typical human environment that make them very receptive, um, to religious thought. Um, dance is one of my favorite metaphors lately. You know, if you, you turn music on around a little kid, uh they’ll, uh, they’ll start moving, they’ll start swaying to it. Um, humans are unusual among animals. There are very few animals that actually will do rhythmic activities and fall into rhythm with each other. And we just naturally do that from early childhood, um, some better than others, but we do these sorts of things, right. And you can, so you can start seeing these building blocks of what you might think of as dance. And so then it would be no surprise then that, uh, of cultural forms that we call recognizes dance are all over the world in most cultural settings, unless they’ve been actively sort of tamped down. Um, so you could use a similar kind of research strategy saying, well, it seems that religious thought of one sort or another, it seems to be all over the place. Well, what are the sort of natural building blocks and how do we study those in the course of development? That’s the general kind of approach,

John Dickson: 
So how does one experiment for this? Can you, can you tell me any, you know, your favorite or a couple of lines of investigation and then the kinds of experiments that they perform to detect this stuff?

Justin Barrett: 
Sure. Uh, I’m a really big fan of, uh, Deborah Kelemen’s work. Uh, she has a Boston university, developmental psychologist, and she’s long been studying what she calls Telio functional reasoning. And that’s, I know that’s very jargon sounding, but what it amounts to is, uh, when it is that we think about the things in the world in terms of what’s it for, what’s it good for? What can I do with it? And what found through a series of studies is that children seem to automatically, it seems, look around the world and they say, see rivers, and they see mountains and they see trees and they see the long neck of a giraffe or the sharp teeth of a crocodile. And they very quickly wonder what’s it for, and they, how did it get here and the kind of answers that they are attracted to in those, why questions are, uh, well, it’s here because it, maybe those sharp teeth are good for tearing things apart, or that mountain is pointy so that, um, people won’t, you know, sit on top of it or stuff like that. So they’re not necessarily good explanations from an adult view, but there, they have this idea of purpose or function involved. Well, how does she know? Well she’s interviewed? A lot of little kids that’s one way to start is to just ask kids these sort of carefully framed questions, show them a picture of something like a tiger and say, you know, what do you think the tiger is here for and see what kids produce? And then she can compare those kinds of answers. She and her colleagues have done that kind of open ended interview, but then they also will compare it with well observations of what parents say and see if they match up. Um, and they often don’t interestingly or setting up little experiments where a, a, the child has to choose between alternatives. So is the rock, here’s a picture of a rock that’s pointy is the rock pointy because bits of stuff piled up over time, or is it pointy so that animals won’t sit on it and smash it, you know, which explanation do you like? And then just count how many kids seem to prefer the functional, purposeful explanation about so animals won’t sit on it versus the mechanistic one, and then you can start getting a profile the way children typically think. Um, so that’s, that’s one approach and it doesn’t sound like religion at that point, but like I said, we’re looking for, what are those sort of building blocks? How do we understand those building blocks? And then how do those get assembled into religious concepts?

John Dickson (Studio)

It’s not quite the rigorous approach of Deborah Keleman and others, but Art Linkletter reveals a similar point. Kids go for functional answers (ones that explain the purpose of things) to mechanistic answers (how things work). The ‘why we need wine’ over the ‘how it was made’. Justin says that’s particularly the case when it comes to questions with religious significance. And it’s not just in countries you’d expect.

John Dickson:
Am I right in thinking, uh, they’ve explored this, not just in Boston, the US the UK, but in places like Japan and China, where, uh, teleology and theism are not, you know, major features of the cultural outlook, I’m thinking of, you know, Oliveira Petrova Petrovich has work in Japan years ago. And then I think there was a more recent article I read, um, based on China. Can you tell me about that?

Justin Barrett: 
Oh, that’s right. Um, so Folks working in this area have started looking all over the world. Do we see the same basic tendencies and other places we do, uh, uh, Kellerman and her collaborators have replicated these studies in China. We see very similar kinds of patterns. What it looks like is that, um, children sort of learned to override this Telio functional reasoning, a little bit younger in China than they do say in the United States or the UK. Um, but, uh, I think the, the, the, the, uh, uh, interpretation that, uh, is getting the most traction there is just that the schooling system is more rigorously sort of anti teleological said, no, no, no, no, no.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let that sink in… Japan has the third-highest number of irreligious and atheist people in the world – 76% of the population. And China has spent decades discouraging a religious outlook – a Marxist, socialist, communist view of the world has historically seen religion as one as a form of alienation. It keeps us from reality, from real solutions to real problems. But Justin Barrett and his colleagues studying the cognitive science of religion have found that belief in a higher power that made and moves the world is common in children everywhere. Here’s part of the abstract from Deborah Kelemen’s famous 2016 article in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology: (remember: “teleological” in this literature refers to thinking that someone intended something for a particular purpose): Young children in Western cultures tend to endorse teleological (function-based) explanations broadly across many domains, even when scientifically unwarranted. Is this bias a product of culture or a product of universal aspects of human cognition? In two studies, we explored whether adults and children in Mainland China, a highly secular, non-Western culture, show a bias for teleological explanations. Overall, these data provide evidence that children’s bias for teleological explanations is not solely a product of Western Abrahamic cultures. Instead, it extends to other cultures, including the East Asian secular culture of modern-day China. This suggests that the bias for function-based explanations may be driven by universal aspects of human cognition. And not just kids but adults too.

Justin Barrett: 
Um, interestingly, uh, Debra Kellerman and Elyssa, Urinefel, they’ve actually done these studies with adults in places like Finland of in sort of notoriously secular country, um, and actually specifically studied atheists in Finland and in the United States and compared to the groups, well, how do you do this with adults? Similar kind of thing you give you say a picture of a particular, uh, natural phenomena and ask a question, what’s it for, or, sorry. No, that’s not right. Don’t ask what it’s for. Um, you, you, you offer different kinds of interpretations of it and have a adults answer as quickly as possible, whether that’s correct or not, whether it’s a good response or not. So I show a picture of a polar bear say, and, uh, and, uh, and the, uh, uh, an explanation that pops up is the polar polar bears are whites because they’ve been bleached by the sun. Is that a good or a bad explanation of why the polar bears white? Okay. That’s a bad one. That’s not why they’re white. Okay. Earthworms tunnel under the soil to aerate the soil. Is that a good or bad explanation? Now that one’s a teleological explanation? It’s not a good explanation. That’s not why earthworms tunnel under the soil that they’re not, Oh, I need to, aerate some soil today. I’m going to go tunneling. That’s not what it’s about. So it’s a bad, but teleological explanation and what Kelemen and her collaborators have found in those kinds of studies is if adults are asked to answer very quickly, suddenly those two logical explanations start looking pretty good. Okay. So there’s a selective error in the direction of teleological thinking, and it fits kind of patterns that she’s also seen in say, uneducated, Romanian adults, who didn’t go through formal schooling. They look like eight year olds in their answering patterns. Okay. So what we see as across cultures, and even in adults, then this tendency to reason teleologically about the natural world. And interestingly it gets connected to, and someone is behind it. If you ask people to answer very quickly, even in atheistic countries like Finland, that the tendency is still there. It’s muted. It looks like it’s been sort of discouraged and tamped down, but it looks like the tendency is still there.

John Dickson (Studio)

It seems that no matter how unbelieving our culture becomes, it’s pretty hard to shake this tendency in the human mind to think of natural things as somehow intended. According to Justin, nothing satisfies a child’s predisposition to see things as ‘intended’ better than an actual belief in God or gods! That’s where we go, after this break…

Break

John Dickson: 
I want to read a quote to you. It’s always a nerve wracking when someone quotes you back to you, that’s actually, if they don’t tell me, it’s me, it’s you and I like it, but I want you to, uh, to give us a comment on it or explain it. Um, cause I find that it’s so dense and lovely “Children’s tendency toward promiscuous teleology, plus their understanding that intentional agents can order and design makes them prone to believe in a designer or creator. Of course we could imagine special cultural conditions in which children are drilled on evolution from an early age and repeatedly told that there is no God that accounts for any part of the natural world. In such extreme cases, children might learn to override their natural tendencies earlier, but barring such special cultural scaffolding, the natural default position seems to be for children to think a nonhuman, someone or someones are the best explanation for the apparent purpose and order in nature all around.”

Justin Barrett: 
Wow. It sounds so much better when you read it. I’m almost convinced Australian accent. Uh, no, thanks for pulling that out. Um, uh, you know, now it’s, uh, probably nine years ago since I’ve written that. And, um, but I still think that’s where the preponderance of evidence is pointing. If anything, we’ve got a little more evidence in that direction. Um, the, you can think of it almost as the conceptual path of least resistance seems to be for this. And a number of other reasons. It seems to be, to think that there’s at least one or one kind of super human being, that accounts for the kind of design and purpose we see in the natural world. Um, even, you know, natural events, things seem to happen for a reason and children also. And we adults too, unless we’re discouraged from thinking this way readily tie that to, um, moral considerations, um, bad things seem to be more likely to happen to bad people is the sort of intuition, uh, which is why it’s so shocking when bad things happen to good people. And we demand an explanation for it that just doesn’t seem right. It’s slightly counter intuitive. And he sets the direction. The evidence seems to be pointing,

John Dickson: 
Which is the opposite of the, you know, the meme that, um, one often hears that, um, atheism is the default position and you have to brainwash a kid to believe in God.

Justin Barrett: 
Yeah. You’re, you’re quite right. That’s, it’s an unfortunate, common assumption, um, that I think it’s, it’s easy to see how that couldn’t be right pretty quickly. Um, given that, um, like any other animal humans are going to have natural sort of evolved dispositions about, uh, what things are good to think, easy to think, and those dispositions are going to incline us one way or another. Um, you might think, well, they incline us toward atheism or something, you know, but an atheist position has already sort of, um, considered that there’s something like a God had rejected it. So I said, okay, Barrett, okay. I didn’t mean an atheist position. I meant an agnostic position. I just, I don’t know. And I’m not even gonna think about it sort of this apathetic atheism. It just wouldn’t even occur to me. Well, it may not occur to a child to think about, uh, the kind of God that we’re used to in Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Well, that, that’s probably right. But what children do seem to have is all of these pieces that are already in place. It’s easy to think about non embodied beings because our cognitive system for thinking about minds doesn’t care for body is present. It’s adapted to hidden people or people at a distance or whatever it is. Um, our, we seem to have this tendency to wonder what things are for even natural things and think they must have a purpose. Their origin is best explained by a purpose. Um, we have these sort of default sort of, uh, moral intuitions that seem to easily link up with the idea of someone events happen. That seemed didn’t demand an explanation, all of these sort of piece together form what I think of as sort of a conceptual space. That’s just waiting to be filled by a cultural input. So the space is there, it needs some kind of a cultural input, but the cultural input has to fit the space.

John Dickson (Studio)

Obviously, religions have tried to fill that conceptual ‘space’, with belief in God or gods.  Christianity, of course, lays great emphasis on teaching the young. My own journey of faith began in high school, through the funny smart explanations of Christianity from a volunteer teacher from the local church. Atheists have recently caught on, and now there are quite a few books and programs trying to inculcate kids in the merits of disbelief. Take this little gem by Jonathan Emmett. The evils of religion are the subject of books aimed at teenagers. Carnegie medal winner Phillip Pullman – who wrote The Golden Compass – told The Washington Post his goal was to undermine Christian belief.  “My books,” he says, “are about killing God.” Pullman’s God has been cruel in the past but has now shrunk to become a decrepit figure, of no practical use to anyone…

Reading – ‘The Golden Compass’

John Dickson (Studio)

It’s a fantastical story about the need to put God aside – in fact, he’d thank us if he could!  But it seems unbelief has an uphill battle, because that conceptual space in the mind of a child – that suspects ‘intention’ is built into the universe – is really quite large and structurally sound.

Justin Barrett:
Atheism doesn’t fit the space very well. And I think it’s for that reason that you often see even when atheism has become a predominant kind of, uh, in the, I should say in the rare cases that are full, thoroughgoing atheism has become predominant. It’s actually fairly rare around the world, but when it does happen, usually there are special cultural conditions that are referred to in that passage, um, formalized education, uh, sort of rigorous encouragement to not think about ghosts and gods and spirits and things. Um, and even sometimes you get these sort of candidates to get squeezed into that conceptual space. Um, so natural selection sometimes we’ll do this job. Children have this well, why do things look the way they did well, natural selection? In fact, you’ll hear people talk about evolution as if evolution intends that this comes about and evolution has these purposes. It’s not for no reason that we see titles talking about evolution like the blind watchmaker. Well, evolution is an agent doing the selfish gene there’s tinkering going on and evolution has got purposes. Um, even some of my atheist colleagues who are evolutionary scientists say, yeah, that’s pretty helpful way to talk it strictly speaking, isn’t that’s not right, but it’s really helpful. It’s easier. Yes, it is. It’s fitting that conceptual space that we just all have and it makes it more palatable. Um, it helps us sort of sit more comfortably in an atheist position because we’ve squeezed into a conceptual space that historically in humanity and cross-culturally has typically been filled by gods of one sort or another.

Media – Richard Dawkins on Christmas

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s well-known sceptic Richard Dawkins … mystified about why children continue to believe in God even when they no longer believe in Santa Claus. I was on ABC’s Q&A some years ago and Dr Cindy Tan said something similar – she compared belief in God with belief in Santa and the tooth-fairy. And, actually, in that moment I was a little dumbfounded. I didn’t say, but I should have said, Isn’t it telling that people grow out of Santa but not God?  I got to put all this to Justin ….

John Dickson:
Why isn’t this just the same as kids believe in Santa and the tooth fairy. And, uh, and then they grow out of it. And, uh, all you’ve found is that they tend to believe in other silly things like gods.

Justin Barrett: 
Yeah. Good question. How’s it different? Um, a number of ways, I mean, uh, Santa Claus and the tooth fairy of course are, uh, engineered ruses by parents and they provide certain kinds of evidence, right. To persuade kids, um, Santa Claus or father Christmas has some things going for him. He certainly has some godlike properties. We can fit some of those conceptual spaces along reasonably well, I think that’s why so contagious, uh, and hangs in there pretty well. So that’s not that it’s a good comparison with how’s it different? Um, uh, he doesn’t account for the design and purpose we see in the natural world. So he doesn’t sort of tick that box. It’s not as satisfying. Um, he doesn’t account for, uh, all kinds of meaning making that we tend to do as we start to get a little bit of older.

Justin Barrett: 
Um, we have that uncomfortable evidence that we find that it was our parents at a certain point when it was, I mean, if you have people that are listening, that it wasn’t their parents. Well, that’s, that’s something else. Um, um, and it’s, you know, and of course there’s the obvious thing is lots of people come to believe in God for philosophical reasons, for other kinds of evidential reasons as adults who didn’t believe as children. Um, and even children seem to be drawn to God concepts, even when their parents are not encouraging them. I’ve had colleagues walk up to me at conferences, developmental psychologists, and say, you know, my, my four year old walked in one day and said, God is everywhere all the time and we’re atheist. So we have no idea where this came from and we’re, we try to figure it out. And I just, I just don’t know where this came from. This is true, true story, actually. And then this developmental psychologist actually told me in a year later, he, I think I have to believe it was maybe it was a, she still believes in God and God is an elderly woman. I found that was an interesting detail because suggested that it wasn’t normal inculturation either. It wasn’t that brainwashing so forth because that wouldn’t have been the brainwashing that would have been going on. Um, so then you might think, well, we’ll compare gods to imaginary friends or something like that, except that they’re shared in a way that imaginary friends usually aren’t. So there are lots of, uh, the comparison with father Christmas and the tooth fairy’s a nice one because it shows both similarities and, and differences. Yeah.

John Dickson (Studio)

There are detractors, of course … many! Acclaimed philosopher and secularist A.C. Grayling is the founder of London’s New College of Humanities. When he came across Justin’s research, he was not well pleased.

John Dickson: 
You’ve been criticized by none other than AC Grayling. I mean, you, you know, you’ve hit the big time when, uh, AC Grayling has a word or two to say about you. You’re a wishful thinker. Um, children are not hardwired to have any religious thoughts. You’re just a Christian and you went searching for this evidence. How do you respond to that? Uh, Royal criticism from the silver-haired boffin?

Justin Barrett:
Uh, You know, I like when I get a, a criticism from a smart person, I’m gonna really look at how much of it is true. Cause maybe there’s some truth there. Yeah. You know, is it the case that I’ve, I certainly have a perspective. We all have a perspective, uh, even, you know, when we’re doing our science, we have certain expectations on the data and we have certain interpretations that we’re inclined towards. So guilty as charged in that regard. But I’ll just say, well, look, I’ve made an argument that is extremely similar in at least the, the general outlines to say Jessie Baring, who is an atheist and developmental and evolutionary psychologists and Pascal Boyay who is also not a religious person at all. Um, um, Scott Atran has made a similar case, again, not an atheist. Most of the people actually who work in my area, cognitive science of religion are not religious people. And we happen to agree on the science to a large extent. Um, so I don’t think it’s just my bias is getting in the way. I mean, one of the things that I found disappointing about Grayling’s critiques is it showed sort of bad faith in the scientific sort of process. Um, if I’m fledging the data I’ll get caught because other people are out there replicating these same studies and I’m trying to get them published and getting them published in peer reviewed journals. Um, so it’s really it’s, I don’t know, I’ll let them, you know, let the science fall where it will.

John Dickson: 
If religiousness is, um, such a natural state of affairs, why does so many people walk away from it and, uh, in our culture today, so many people are not religious.

Justin Barrett: 
Yeah, go ahead. Um, I’m going to do that annoying sort of, uh, academic thing and say, well, first I don’t think as many people walk away from being religious, as they, as we think they do now, what does he mean? Um, what we often see is actually just trading out one religion for something else that at least in other context would have been considered religious. So it’s been observed for instance, that while say church attendance has been on a pretty steady decline in much of Europe, same, um, simultaneously belief in spiritism and the occult has been on the rise. Belief in ghosts has been going up, um, other kinds of new age things. Uh, lots of, uh, you know, we mentioned the far East before in China, lots of people say I’m not religious. And then you observe what they actually do. And they are involved in ancestor cults, and they certainly have, uh, lots of rituals that they engage in. So what we usually are seeing is a swapping of one set for another. Okay. So there’s that qualification, but then there’s yes, but I asked about Barrett. There are these people who aren’t doing that stuff, at least as far as we can tell them, I think that’s right. Um, I think that we’re seeing that for a number of reasons. Part of it certainly is the disenchantment with the failings of organized religion, right? People are disillusioned, um, from various scandals and inadequacies. And I think those are the sorts of things that organized religious folks need to take seriously. Um, uh, what I, if, if that’s the only cause though I would predict a very unstable, sort of a religiosity that is once somebody figures out, okay, we, we need to do better. They’re going to attract those people back, um, you know, into an maybe another religion. Um, it’s certainly the case that, uh, we live in an era now of greater access to what you might think of as intellectual resources that we can use to think things that are less intuitive. So if religion is fairly intuitive, then we’ve got more resources for overriding those intuitions, or at least holding them back a little bit and saying, well, okay, yeah, I’ve got these intuitions, you know, and I’m, I have lots of kind of experiences and impressions that fit well with some kind of a religious framework, but there are these sort of scientific and philosophical kinds of accounts that maybe they sort of erode those a bit. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna bank on those for now. Well, why am I doing that? Lots of personal motivations get in there. Um, you know, and, uh, one of the things that is an exciting area of scientific inquiry, and I know is the scientific study of atheism is starting to pick up, um, for just the reasons you’re raising. And, uh, so it’s premature for me to give a solid answer. Uh, but it sure looks like there are different forms of atheism. Not everybody sort of becomes non-religious for the same reasons and lots of people who call themselves atheists actually hold on to some elements of religious thought.

John Dickson:
Well, yeah, I was about to say, I remember interviewing Oliveira Petrovich from Oxford a years ago, and she had found in surveys she’d conducted that about half of the self affirmed atheists on followup interviews, admitted they did believe in some grand mind behind the universe. They just don’t think of it as God. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Let me interrupt myself for a second to share a snippet of that interview with Dr Petrovich, courtesy of my mates at the Centre for Public Christianity…

Media – CPX interview

Justin Barrett: 
That’s right. That’s no, uh, absolutely. Uh, I mentioned Jesse baring earlier, um, and he has, you know, and I mentioned, he’s not a believer, he’s an atheist. And he has studied atheism to a certain extent. And, uh, he’s actually been one of the more vocal, uh, scholars in this area claiming that atheists at least many atheists still, if you, as you say, if you still sort of ask the right questions and push the right way, have intuitions consistent with say afterlife, beliefs or intuitions consistent with yeah. But everything means something has some deeper meaning to it, some deeper purpose. Um, this isn’t just some accidents that we’re all here. They still have those intuitions, um, that sort of leak through. And so at least his view is they’re actually very few completely satisfied, intellectually consistent atheists. And he would even count himself in that. I think, um, maybe he’s overstating it a bit, but he’s, he’s sort of a provocative guy, but this certainly seems to be the case. Um, but I would just, like, there are plenty of religious people who are not sort of settled in intellectual way sort of consistent either. And if we’re really honest about these things

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press pause… I’ve got a five minute Jesus for you. In recent decades we’ve learned a lot about the way institutions like the Church haven’t cared for children in the way they should. The Boston Globe’s famous Spotlight investigations between 2001 and 2003 found that under an extraordinary cloak of secrecy, the Archdiocese of Boston in the 10 years prior to publication had quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests. They had sometimes just reassigned known pedophiles to other parishes or parallel ministries in hospitals and prisons. Some of these priests offended again. The Globe reports triggered a raft of other investigations around the United States and the world. The largest ever conducted actually was the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It found that as many as 7 per cent of priests in some Christian denominations were pedophiles, and that church officials had – at least in some cases – sought to protect the Church’s reputation more than the children in their care. Now, this issue deserves an entire episode and I promise to confront this topic. My point for now, though, is that Christian institutions haven’t lived up to the community standards of care, let alone the standards demanded of them by Jesus himself. The New Testament actually opens with a shocking indictment of violence against children. Matthew 2 reports that Herod the Great slaughtered the infants of Bethlehem and surrounds in an effort to kill the baby Jesus. Now, admittedly, there’s no external evidence for this event outside Matthew’s Gospel. It was probably too small an event to mention, involving maybe only 10-20 children. But it is the sort of thing we know Herod did throughout his reign. So the Gospel opens with a stark reminder of the pure evil of the powerful abusing the most vulnerable. There were other, much less dramatic examples of the mistreatment of children in the Gospels. So this time, it’s by Jesus’ own disciples, we’re told in Mark 10, that people were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. But the disciples rebuked them. Ordinarily, children weren’t really meant to be seen in public. There’s a sense in which these parents who wanted Christ’s blessing on their kids were breaking a polite decorum. The disciples probably thought they were preserving Jesus’ honor by rebuking the parents. Jesus had more important things to do, right? But we’re told in the next line that when Jesus saw this, he was indignant. This is a really strong word: Aganakteo. It’s like our word “outraged”. Jesus then rebuked his followers in the words that follow in the text, “Let the little children come to me,” he said, “and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. Elsewhere we get a similar teaching. In Matthew 18, Jesus has a whole discourse on the topic, part of which goes like this: Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven … If -anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea … See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” There are so many interesting things here. We can probably surmise that Jesus’ own response to child abuse and cover-ups in the Church would be something like: “It would be better for such church officials to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

Then there’s the weird reference to children having their own angels in heaven “who always see the face of my Father”. There’s loads of discussion about what that might mean. Frankly, I can’t make up my mind, but at the very least, Jesus is saying (whether metaphorically or literally) that children are represented before the throne of the ultimate judge.

I’m also struck by Jesus’ insistence that no one gets into the kingdom of God unless they change and become like little children. Or, as that other statement in Mark’s Gospel puts it, “Let the little children come to me for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Jesus is referring to the humility of children. I don’t quite mean that kids excel in the virtue of humility instead of selfishness. I’m a Dad. I know that kids can be as self-absorbed as the greatest adult narcissist! But still there’s definitely an openness in children to the knowledge that they’re not the masters of the universe, that their lives depend on others, that they don’t know everything. Their incessant curiosity about flowers, clouds, even dirt is an intellectual humility – a realisation that there are millions of things yet to be discovered. And obviously they look at nature and the world around them in awe and wonder, and sometimes fear, because they more immediately recognise their smallness in the scheme of things. It’s really adults who are deceived into thinking we’re so large in the world. This humility – whether intellectual curiosity or the sense of dependence – is sometimes lost on us. We grow up to be cynical, not curious. We grow up to imagine we control everything when actually we’re tiny and totally dependent. And Jesus seems to be saying, at the very least, that without this openness – this humility, this sense of dependence – we’re not going to understand the Christian faith, let alone know how to embrace it. Those who abuse children sure aren’t getting into the kingdom, but nor are those who don’t become like children. You can press play now.

John Dickson: 
Returning to the, um, what seems well evidenced a thesis that kids naturally inclined toward belief in God or gods, um, wouldn’t that explain away religion. Um, how do you personally think about, I know it’s beyond the sort of psychology, but how do you personally think about the response of the atheist who says, well, there you go. That’s why the world has been so religious, uh, we’ve just evolved to have this weird habit of inventing gods.

Justin Barrett: 
Yeah. I understand that the, uh, the temptation to go down that road, I think it’s not as promising for the atheist as it first appears. And the reason why is, um, we have lots of early evolving intuitions and, uh, thought tendencies, um, early developing in childhood that seem to be part of our evolutionary heritage. One of those for instance, is believing that other people have conscious thoughts. We may be the only animal who actually represents other people’s thoughts about other people’s thoughts, for instance. And, uh, that’s a pretty good trick. Well, if we can come up with sort of a psychological explanation or a picture of that development and evolutionary account, does that mean that suddenly, Oh, well, that’s why we believe other people have minds. Okay. They don’t have them off. I go. And I’m like, well, that doesn’t sound right. Or there’s a perfectly good evolutionary account of why we think that our mothers love us. Um, so does that mean we shouldn’t think our mothers love us? Well, that doesn’t seem right. Um, most of the most important things about being human and usually in the history of at least Western philosophy, we start with intuitions when we start reasoning and we especially intuitions that just sort of pop into our heads and they seem stable, deep seated. We usually give those the benefit of the doubt. And so merely having a scientific explanation that says, Hey, you know, these things evolved, or this is how they develop in childhood. Well, that’s not enough. What we need to show is that they are also error prone in some important way, or they’re working outside of their sort of domain of, of, of proper function. Like if we, uh, uh, you know, are trying to use our eyes in the dark and we see things well, that’s a good time to doubt that our eyes are working because they work in the light, not in the dark. Okay. So if I see something in those conditions, I should be suspicious. Well, are these beliefs in gods, those kinds of beliefs, it’s not obvious that they are, unless you’ve already decided that there are no gods and that’s called begging the question. Um, so I don’t think it’s quite as promising. Um, it would also lead to a very uncomfortable position. I’ve, I’ve likened it to, I did a paper with a philosopher once that was, uh, I managed to work the term beer goggles into the title. Is that an Australian sort of term, you know, about beer goggles? Okay. So you’d go to the bar and after a couple of drinks, people start looking better and their beer goggles are on. Right. That’s, that’s the idea. So I’ve likened it to, so imagine you go into a bar with a buddy and, um, your buddy thinks that, wow, there are all of these sort of attractive people in here, and you just don’t see it. And in fact, lots of people seem to think there are lots of attractive people and you’re just not seeing it. Ah, but they’ve got their beer goggles on. So now you’ve got, and you’ve, you’re the designated driver. So you’ve just been drinking, you know, cranberry juice or something. Um, so you’ve got an adequate explanation for why all of these people see are, are seeing something so differently than you are, but should you be that comfortable if we think analogously to this other case, because if it’s like that, if that’s what’s going on with religious thought, if everybody’s got their beer goggles on, they’re a natural part of our human equipment, we’ve got them on all the time. Does that lead us to having to be skeptical about other things we hold near and dear, because suddenly we’ve sort of undercut the ordinary equipment. It would be different if we thought, no, there’s this special, a bit of the brain that is just sort of an accident that, you know, if there’s too much, I don’t know of a certain chemical in the water, when you’re in the womb, then you develop this weird little bit of the brain. And that’s what leads to it. That Freudian pathology, GPU, that would be different because then we go, okay, that if something went wrong in development, that’s why they believe, but everybody’s got the same equipment and it tends to lead most people down this path. Well, be careful if you think, Oh, well that’s an error prone system because you may lose having to believe in all kinds of things that we actually want to keep hold of moral truths. Uh, the existence of other minds that are moms love us kinds of stuff. Cause suddenly we’re just massively skeptical. 

John Dickson (Studio)

In Dec 2017 the Pew Research Center conducted a really interesting study about what Americians mean when they say they do or don’t have religion.  Unlike most surveys, that just ask: Do you believe in God, yes or no?, the Pew study asked important follow-up questions. And they found that a significant portion of those who say they don’t have any religion, nonetheless hold spiritual beliefs. Among the key findings is that 17% of Americans fall into this “nones” category (no religion), but on follow up, most of the “nones” (72% of them) say they do believe in God or a higher spiritual power. There’s an even more interesting finding. 19% of Americans when asked if they believe in God, answer with a straight no. This might normally be reported as something like “one fifth of Americans are atheists”. But the Pew study followed up with the question. This 19% who don’t believe in God were asked to clarify whether they “do not believe in God as described in the Bible, but do believe there is some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe.” Half of these potential atheists said they do believe in a higher spiritual power in the universe. In other words, half of them aren’t atheists at all. Researchers went further. They asked those who believe in some other higher spiritual power (but not the God of the Bible) to ascribe various qualities or actions to that higher power.  More than half said they believe this Power loves all people (69%), is omniscient (53%), has protected them (68%) and rewarded them (53%). I would love to see some further research into European and Australian “Nones”. I suspect it would bear out the same point. Belief in God (even when it’s not called God) is very resilient, tenacious even. The Bible has long said that the “heavens proclaim the glory of God” (Ps 19), that the creation itself points to God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom 1). These are statements about “teleology” – the whole thing looks set up to get our attention. The child intuits purpose and intent in the world, in a way that can’t rationally be compared to thoughts about Santa Claus. And when adults grow up, that rational intuition mostly remains. And this is true even though so much of our world distracts us from spiritual things and downright discourages talk of God. Given mainstream culture’s aversion to talking about “high spiritual powers” and an “omniscient” “loving” Being, it is frankly amazing – sociologically and psychologically – that these beliefs continue to endure in the secular West. Theologically, of course, it’s exactly what you’d expect if there really was a higher spiritual power that loves you … and wants you to know that.

Undeceptions theme