The Telegraph
By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
2:54PM GMT 24 Nov 2008
Children are "born believers" in God and do not simply acquire religious beliefs through indoctrination, according to an academic. Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.
Children are born believers in God, academic claims - Telegraph
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Naturally, the default position has always been theism given the atheist's logically indefensible ontology and pathological intellectual dishonesty. Atheism truly is the gravest depravity.
Sorry, but this is nonsense, through and through. There's no reason to accept such unsupported claims which are noting more fhan the "because I say", command.
Support this with proof that we are implanted with polytheism / monotheism / belief in magical gods.
Babies seem to be blank slates, devoid of anything but instinct (eat, defecate, sleep, that sort of thing). They also display curiosity and experiment with their environment, so they seem far more in tune with the processes of science as opposed to those of faith. If you raise a baby in a Hindu culture, it will almost certainly embrace Hinduism; if in a Christian home, Christianity. All theistic beliefs are brought externally to human beings, none of them display inherent hardwiring. If you raise a child devoid of god concepts in the middle of a remote jungle, the child will not arbitrarily and spontaneously generate theism. I am not a theist, I am an atheist and your statement that presumes we are implanted with a god spirit requires it to be supported or discarded as mere speculation (and you're entitled to speculation).
At this point he is merely publishing his initial findings and conclusions based on a number of studies. The work is sociological in nature, and is hardly complete. It's an interesting hypothesis that does in fact have logical and experimental support. Your empiricist philosophizing is that which is arbitrary and unscientific.
Get real! Atheists have always been and shall always be vastly outnumbered by theists precisely because of the stupidity that imagines that via some staggeringly complex convergence of fortuitous coincidences dumb rocks came to contemplate themselves!
Once again, from my blog:
This impression comes to us immediately and all at once: either (1) the universe has always existed in some form or another, in some dimensional estate or another, or (2) it was caused to exist by a being who has always existed, a necessarily transcendent being of unlimited genius and power. In other words, the First Cause is either inanimate or sentient, immanent or transcendent.
That does not mean, however, that this objectively apparent impression constitutes a proof for either alternative. It demonstrates that it's at the base of knowledge, that it's derived from reason, not faith.
I have no interest in proving God's existence to anyone, just in demonstrating the absurdities that arise from the denial of the possibility, which, incidentally, do not plague the bald assertion that God must be whatsoever. The reason for this is self-evident: the idea of God pertains to the origin of the universe, not to its nonexistence, while the unqualified denial of God's existence detours around an inescapable imperative: the undeniable possibility. The former stems from larger considerations that do not interrupt the natural course of logic; the latter is akin to the blind devotion of religious fanaticism.
Hollie, snap out of it! The fundamental rational forms and logical categories of the human mind relative to the imperatives of identity (the laws of classical logic) and the operations of its comprehensive expression (the univocal, the analogical and the equivocal/metaphoric), are universal! So too are certain rational and mathematical imperatives, which include the constructs of causation/origin, quantity, quality, the fundamentals of language formation and so on. . . .
You talk like an Objectivist. Rand was a dingbat.
Behaviorism is dead! Hard empiricism is dead! No serious thinker has taken the extremes of Aristotelian or Lockean blank-slate theory seriously since Kant, who forged the rationalist-empiricist synthesis. (By the way, the Bible holds to a rationalist-empiricist construct of epistemology.) Berkeley and Hume were by far Locke’s superiors, and Descartes is the unrivaled genius of rationalism. Had we remained stuck on the stupid of hard empiricism, we would not have ventured beyond Newtonian physics. Berkelean cosmology, the philosophical precursor of general relativity, by the way, and Kantian cosmology, the philosophical precursor of quantum physics, were asserted in defiance of the Newtonian paradigm before there was proof precisely because of the rational and empirical implications of certain imperatives, as these men saw it, relative to the necessity of divinity. General relativity and quantum physics do not point away from God. They point toward God.
Intellectual barbarians like Dawkins and Krauss and Hawking who scorn the logic-driven disciplines of philosophy and theology are utterly unaware of the philosophical-theological ramifications of the cosmological models they embrace, let alone aware of the fact that these models were anticipated by theists decades before the Twentieth Century!
As for ultimate origin, there are but two alternatives in terms of being: inanimateness or consciousness. Period. The problem of origin is not a figment of culture! The assertion of the new atheism to the contrary is beyond stupid! The problem of origin/ultimate causation is inescapable! The construct of divinity relative to ultimate causation/origin imposes itself on human consciousness without the latter willing that it do so! The construct objectively exists in and of itself, and the atheist necessarily acknowledges that fact every time he opens his yap to deny that there be any substance behind the idea.
Then we teach them evolution, and turn them into idiots:
For the rest of us, there is Faith, knowledge gained through the study of cause and effect, and the hope of Salvation. I'm confident that the Human Spirit Celebrates Justice, and seeks it with sincerity of Heart, by design. We are of greater value than the tangents we create. Realizing that, is more a matter of when, than if. The road to Salvation is full of stumbling blocks, for both believers and nonbelievers alike. Something we each need to face.
