The idea that atheism ought be assumed by default is a chimera. Atheism cannot be assumed by default, it must be demonstrated. The belief that given the failure of theistic case for God, atheism ought be assumed does not only commit an appeal to ignorance but is also against the picture painted by modern discoveries in Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR).
Several recent researches in CSR shows that children naturally hold certain universal religious ideas such as belief in divine agents and belief in mind-body dualism. Similar to universals of language, universals of religious belief include principles that are shared in all culture and time, the belief in supernatural beings.
Paul Bloom explained that it was believed that those beliefs in Gods, the afterlife &c., could not have been a result of innate but social and cultural learned beliefs. Observing a recently growing body of literature on this field, however, Bloom affirmed that such a view is no longer entirely right. Though culture plays a certain role, “some of the universals of religion are unlearned”(Bloom 2007: 149) Jesse M. Bering concurs with Bloom’s observation. He wrote:
Although conventional wisdom tends to favor a general learning hypothesis for the origins of after-life beliefs, recent findings suggest a more complicated developmental picture (Bering 2006: 454).
The idea that belief in supernatural beings requires indoctrination appears to be false. Bering explained that these findings show that the origins of such beliefs are not cultural indoctrinated. Children are natural predisposed, hard-wired, to hold such beliefs. This natural bias enables cultural indoctrinating to set in with ease. Atheism is thus unnatural. It requires indoctrination.
Following Bering, Darwinian mechanisms can reveal “how the standard architecture of ancestral human minds was co-opted by natural selection to create the functional illusion of an intelligently designed, immortal soul that was under nearly unbreakable moralistic contract with the natural world.”(Bering 2006: 461) A religion-critic may argue that, given our idea of gods is a by-product of our evolutionary process, then such beliefs are false. This, though, would be a fallacious reasoning because giving a successful account of how a person acquired a particular belief p does not address the truth-value of such belief. Belief p may have been acquired in a very dubious or unreliable methods yet true.
An illustration is required to take this point home. John Doe believes that his wife Jane Doe, 7 days pregnant, is going to have a baby girl because they made love 8 days before in the kitchen. Showing how dubious John’s belief aroused does not remotely address whether his belief is true or not. To show that John’s belief is false, we must examine not how John came to hold such a belief but whether or no Jane is carrying a baby girl. Providing a naturalistic explanation of John’s origins of belief does not discredit his belief.
Theists can agree with Bering and contend in line with Alvin Plantinga that, it is possible that “God [has] designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.” Plantinga added:
Clearly, it is possible both that there is an explanation in terms of natural processes of religious belief (perhaps a brain physiological account of what happens when someone holds religious beliefs), and that these beliefs have a perfectly respectable epistemic status (2000: 145).
If what I contended and the findings in CRS is correct, unlike theism, atheism requires cultural indoctrination. We are not born atheists. Theism is nature’s favored preparedness default. If this is correct, atheism cannot simply be assumed by default, it must be demonstrated. It must demonstrate that our natural bias toward theism is an accidental by product of our bellum omnium contra omnes. To show that our natural bias towards belief in God(s) is false, atheism must be demonstrated to be true. As in John-Jane example, God(s) must be demonstrated not to exist. This is why the idea that atheism ought be assumed by default is a chimera.
Bering, J.M. (2006). ‘The folk psychology of souls,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29:453-498
Bloom, P. (2007). ‘Religion is natural,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 1:147-151
Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This post makes sense only if you conflate all these terms – pattern-seeking with causal agency with belief with theism with religion with god with an after-life with design. If all those are synonyms, then I’ll grant you that non belief is not the default. But as soon as you introduce differences, your thesis falls apart.
You don’t naturally believe in any specific god from any specific religion without some kind of formal training… usually by childhood indoctrination (because this works best… gosh, I cannot for the life of me think why this might be so effective). That’s why all these religions depend on such teaching for new recruits: because it is NOT naturally occurring.
This is demonstrable.
For example, why don’t you believe in Quetzalcoatl? Aren’t you ‘hard-wired’ for this belief? Oh right… the hard-wiring refers to something else, doesn’t it? In fact, it would be really unusual for you, as a child, to tell an interviewer that for as long as you can remember, you have always believed in Quetzalcoatl. In fact, your belief in an after-life (having seen stuff alive that then becomes dead and something then seems to be missing) means the same thing as belief in Quetzalcoatl, and that everyone comes prepared by hard-wiring to know about Quetzalcoatl, which is really good evidence that Quetzalcoatl is true, actually exists, intervenes in the world, yada yada yada.
The coherence of the thesis disappears as soon as we look at what each part means.
Yes, children make all kinds of thinking mistakes that they learn how to avoid. That doesn’t make what is believed to be ‘hard-wired’. Assuming agency in any detected pattern is one kind of thinking mistake. This doesn’t mean that religious belief is hard-wired because children assume hidden agency any more than it means it’s ‘unnatural’ to understand conservation of mass even when shapes change. Children learn why they are easily fooled by appearances, fooled by thinking shortcuts, fooled by assuming agency to all patterns. Their brains develop. To utilize an early stage of cognitive development to suggest that this is the default for a later state, the ‘natural’ state for an ‘unnatural’ state later, is really poor ontology. The default position you yourself utilize everyday with your developed brain is to not believe stuff about reality that acts contrary to its usual state. You’ve learned to NOT do this because it doesn’t work. Yet here you are pretending that the exception is the rule, that to believe in exactly this exception is the default because undeveloped brains do this, which is hardly a ringing endorsement of the thinking quality required for religious belief… one that assumes as a virtue such child-like gullibility, child-like credulity, child-like belief in supernaturalism for the unexplained, and child-like trust in authority that tells them this is true when you yourself don’t do this ever… save for one exception you call your religious belief.
For those interested with those researches and want to explore:
Barrett, J.L. (2007). ‘Is the spell really broken? Bio-psychological explanations of religion and theistic belief,’ Theology & Science, 5(1), 57–72.
________ (2008). ‘Coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness in religious concepts: Theoretical and methodological reflections,’ Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20, 308–338.
Barrett, J.L., Burdett, E.R. & Porter, T.J. (2009). ‘Counterintuitiveness in folktales: Finding the cognitive optimum,’ Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3), 271–287.
Barrett, J.L., Newman, R.M. & Richert, R.A. (2003). ‘When seeing does not lead to believing: Children’s understanding of the importance of background knowledge for interpreting visual displays,’ Journal of Cognition & Culture, 3(1), 91–108.
Bering, J.M.,(2006). ‘The folk psychology of souls,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, 453–462.
Bering, J.M., Herna ́ndez-Blasi, C., Bjorkland, D.F.,( 2005). ‘The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in secularly and religiously schooled children,’ British Journal of Developmental Psychology 23, 587–607.
Bloom, P., (2004). Descartes’ Baby: How Child Development Explains What Makes
Us Human. William Heinemann, London.
Evans, E.M.,( 2000). ‘The emergence of belief about the origins of species in school-aged children,’ Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 46, 221–254.
Evans, E.M., (2001). ‘Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: creation versus evolution.,’ Cognitive Psychology 42, 217–266.
Foster, C., (2009). Wired for Belief? The Biology of Spiritual Experience. Hodder & Stoughton, London.
Kelemen, D. (2007). “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists?’ Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature.” Psychological Science 15:295–301.
Kelemen, D., DiYanni, C.,(2005). ‘Intuitions about origins: purpose and intelligent design in children’s reasoning about nature,’ Journal of Cognition and Development 6, 3–31.
Kelemen, D., Rosset, E., (2009). ‘The human function compunction: teleological explanations in adults,’ Cognition 111, 138–143.
If you want more, let me know.