Childish God
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God said, "Adam and Eve, don't eat the apple tree or I'll punish you." And then the devil came along and kind of hepatized them. And then God went to see someone. And then they got real sick. And then they hid from God.

And they threw up. Who took the first bite? Adam. Then Eve. Then Eve. Then Eve. Boy, I bet God was mad. Yeah, then God sent them to hell, and they transported on to Los Angeles.

That's Art Linkletter from the legendary 1960s TV spot Kids Say the Darnedest 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 for a kid is non-belief. Left to themselves, kids would never grow up thinking about God and the afterlife and so on. Religion, therefore, is this 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 byproducts of American or Western culture. They are natural. Believing that someone, not something, governs the world comes as easily to kids as curiosity, imagination, and play.

I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics. New book, How Not to Read the Bible, by Dan Kimble.

Every episode, we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. By the way, stay tuned to the end today, and you'll hear a very different version of our theme tune sent to us during the week by one of our listeners, a talented jazz muso.

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 an intellectually lazy person. So I thought, you know, I'll go into an area that doesn't have too much literature that I have to read. So that's kind of how I stumbled into it.

Professor Justin Barrett is an American experimental psychologist who was the director of the Thrive Center 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 Center for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University.

He's 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. Music

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 of finding meaning and hope amidst our sense of alienation. And he believed that religion just created another kind of alienation, one where we surrender our own goals and aspirations to some imaginary monarch in the sky.

This psychologizing about religion was all the rage in that period. Around the same time, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote his Essence of Christianity,

where he described religion as a wish fulfillment, which is an incredibly popular idea today, but it really begins with him. We long, he said, for a benevolent guide to life and then satisfy that longing by imagining there is an omnipotent being we call God. And 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 or daddy in the sky, and we find it in God. Of course, smart people in Freud's day replied that perhaps his atheism was just a projection of his rejection of his overbearing father. But I wouldn't be so unkind. Sigmund, the card you got me for Martha's Day, is it definitely for me?

Yeah. Do you like it? Um, it's a little bit weird. Weird? Is it a joke? No. But you call me a sexy little hottie. So? Sigmund, I'm your mother. Ja. Und also sexy little hottie. Nicht my fault. You're confused. You're young. I'm not young. Ein Freud. Sexy is a... Okay, excuse me.

I thought that we had a little bit of a vibe going on here. You know, we live together, we cook for each other. You said you loved me. You're my soul. And you're my shining star. Oh, you, my little shwety-ling! Stay out of this, Dad! Okey-dokey. If you do not accept me, I will gouge my eyes out or base an entire school of thought on my incestuous urges.

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 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.

When people think of psychology of religion, they think of Sigmund Freud and the impression he has left that religion is really a neurosis. What influence does that view of religion as a neurosis or a defect, how influential is that in psychology today?

You know, I think you are correct that that legacy from Freud sort of has its echoes today. So psychologists who really haven't studied the area, haven't looked carefully at it by default sort of assume, yeah, there's something pathological here.

Those who have been studying it, though, 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 doing it.

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. 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.

sort of on its face that should at least give us pause. It would be surprising to have such a widespread pathology. But you're right, it still remains the default position. Tell me about the growing body of research suggesting that children are naturally inclined toward religious belief.

The basic idea here is if religious thought is so widespread or thought we might deem religious, then

And it seems to at least there are sort of anecdotal cases and people's impressions that it comes to children very easily then we should see kind of toeholds if you use a sort of a climbing metaphor or 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 psychological mechanisms

basic ways about the way human minds develop that are ordinary part of just how kids grow up in a typical human environment that make them very receptive to religious thought. I think of it as a little bit analogous to other forms of cultural expression, like language or art or dance or sport.

Dance is one of my favorite metaphors lately. You know, if you turn music on around a little kid, they'll start moving. They'll start swaying to it. 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.

Some better than others, but we do these sorts of things, right? And 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 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.

So you could use a similar kind of research strategy saying, well, it seems that religious thought of one sort or another 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.

So how does one experiment for this? Can you tell me any, you know, your favorite or a couple of lines of investigation and the kinds of experiments that they perform to detect this stuff? Sure. I'm a really big fan of Deborah Kellerman's work. She is a Boston University developmental psychologist.

And she's long been studying what she calls teleofunctional reasoning. And that's I know that's very jargon sounding. But what it amounts to is 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 she's found through a series of studies is that children seem to automatically, it seems, look around the world and they say you 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 wonder.

How did it get here? And the kind of answers that they are attracted to in those why questions are, well, it's here because it may be those sharp teeth are good for tearing things apart.

or that mountain is pointy so that people won't sit on top of it, or stuff like that. So they're not necessarily good explanations from an adult view, but 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. And they often don't, interestingly. Or setting up little experiments where 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? 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 about the way children typically think.

So 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? Roxanne Burns, what's your favorite Bible story? About the wine. Where?

Where did it happen? When Jesus was born. When Jesus went where? At the wedding. At the wedding. What did he turn, how did he make the wine? With his power. Out of what did he make the wine? Water. That's right. Now, when Jesus made the water into wine at the wedding, that's the story. What do we learn from that story? We learned...

The more wine we get, the better the wedding is.

It's not quite the rigorous approach of Deborah Kellerman and others, but Art Linkletter reveals a similar point. Kids prefer functional answers, ones that explain the purpose of things, rather than mechanistic answers, how things work. The why we need wine over how it was made. Justin Barrett says that's particularly the case when it comes to questions with religious significance.

And it's not just in the countries you'd expect.

Am I right in thinking they've explored this not just in Boston, the US, the UK, but in places like Japan and China where teleology and theism are not major features of the cultural outlook? I'm thinking of, you know, Olivera Petrovich's work in Japan years ago. And then I think there was a more recent article I read based on China.

Can you tell me about that? So folks working in this area have started looking all over the world. Do we see these same basic tendencies in other places? We do. Kellerman and her collaborators have replicated these studies in China.

We see very similar kinds of patterns. What it looks like is that children sort of learn to override this teleofunctional reasoning a little bit younger in China than they do, say, in the United States or the UK. But I think the interpretation that is getting the most traction there is just that the schooling system is more rigorously sort of anti-teleological. 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 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 Kellerman's famous 2016 article in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Remember, the word 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 it's not just kids. Interestingly, Deborah Kellerman and Elissa Yarnfeld have actually done these studies with adults.

in places like Finland, in sort of notoriously secular country, and actually specifically studied atheists in Finland and in the United States and compared those groups. Well, how do you do this with adults?

A similar kind of thing, you give, say, a picture of a particular natural phenomena. You offer different kinds of interpretations of it and have 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 an explanation that pops up is the polar bears are white because they've been bleached by the sun. Is that a good or a bad explanation of why the polar bear is 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. 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 Kellerman and her collaborators have found in those kinds of studies is if adults are asked to answer very quickly,

suddenly those teleological 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 is across cultures and even in adults, then this tendency to reason teleologically about the natural world. 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.

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

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That's where we go after the break. I want to read a quote to you. It's always nerve-wracking when someone quotes you back to you. But 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 non-human someone or someone's

Are the best explanation for the apparent purpose and order in nature all around Wow, it sounds so much better when you read it. No, thanks for pulling that out you know now it's probably nine years ago since I've written that and 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 and

You can think of it almost as the conceptual path of least resistance seems to be to think that there's at least one or one kind of superhuman being that accounts for the kind of design and purpose we see in the natural world. 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 moral considerations. Bad things seem to be more likely to happen to bad people is the sort of intuition, 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 counterintuitive. At least that's the direction the evidence seems to be pointing.

Which is the opposite of the meme that one often hears, that atheism is the default position and you have to brainwash a kid to believe in God. Yeah, you're quite right. It's an unfortunate common assumption that I think it's easy to see how that couldn't be right pretty quickly. Given that...

Like any other animal, humans are going to have natural sort of evolved dispositions about what things are good to think, easy to think. And those dispositions are going to incline us one way or another. You might think, well, they incline us toward atheism or something. But an atheist position has already sort of...

considered that there's something like a God and rejected it. So you say, 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 going to think about it. Sort of this apathetic atheism just wouldn't even occur to me. Well, it may not occur to a child to think about the kind of God that we're used to in Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Well, 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 if a body is present. It's adapted to hidden people or people at a distance or whatever it is. 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.

We have these sort of default sort of moral intuitions that seem to easily link up with the idea of someone. Events happen that seem to demand an explanation. All of these sort of pieced 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.

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, How the Borks Became an Adventure in Evolution. The thing about borks is no two are a match. They're all a bit different. Just look at this batch. These odd little differences help the borks thrive. Without them, it's doubtful they'd still be alive.

You see, books haven't always looked as they do. Their fur was once short and its colour was blue. And those long skinny necks they make them so tall were once very squat and not skinny at all. This might start you wondering, wondering how? How did the books become what they are now? The evils of religion are the subject of books aimed at teenagers.

Carnegie Medal winner Philip 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. Good luck with that. Pullman's God has been cruel in the past, but has now shrunk to become a decrepit figure of no practical use to anyone.

Demented and powerless, the aged being could only weep and mumble in fear and pain and misery, and he shrank away from what seemed like yet another threat. "'It's all right,' Will said. "'We can help you. Come on, we won't hurt you.'

The shaking hand seized his and feebly held on. The old one was uttering a wordless, groaning whimper that went on and on and grinding on his teeth and compulsively plucking at himself with his free hand. But as Lyra reached in to help him, he tried to smile and to bow, and his ancient eyes, deep in their wrinkles, blinked at her with innocent wonder.

Between them, Will and Lyra helped the Ancient of Days out of his crystal cell. It wasn't hard, for he was as light as paper, and he would have followed them anywhere, having no will of his own.

but in the open air there was nothing to stop the wind from damaging him, and to their dismay his form began to loosen and dissolve. Only a few moments later he had vanished completely, and their last impression was of those eyes blinking in wonder and a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief.

It's a fantastical story about the need to put God aside. In fact, God would thank us for it if he could. But it seems unbelief has a really uphill battle because that conceptual space in the mind of a child, that space that suspects intention is built into the universe, is really quite large and structurally sound. Atheism doesn't fit the space very well.

And I think it's for that reason that you often see, even when the rare cases that a 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 I referred to in that passage, formalized education, sort of rigorous encouragement to not think about ghosts and gods and spirits and things.

And even sometimes you get these sort of candidates to get squeezed into that conceptual space. So natural selection sometimes will 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.

There's tinkering going on. Evolution's got purposes. Even some of my atheist colleagues who are evolutionary scientists say, yeah, that's a pretty helpful way to talk about it. Strictly speaking, that's not right, but it's really helpful. It's easier to

Yes, it is. It's fitting that conceptual space that we just all have, and it makes it more palatable. 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. The thing about Father Christmas is that when children finally realize there is no Father Christmas...

They're quite happy about it. And the odd thing is that they don't do the same thing with God. And that's the really weird thing. I remember my... Sorry, what don't they do with God? Yeah, happily give it up. They give up Father Christmas, but they persist with God. Why do you think that is?

I'm baffled by it. That's interesting. That's well-known Oxford professor 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 program some years ago, and Dr. Cindy Tan said the same thing. She compared belief in God with belief in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, she said. 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? Anyway, I got to put this to Justin.

Why isn't this just the same as kids believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, and then they grow out of it, and all you've found is that they tend to believe in other silly things like gods? Yeah, good question. How's it different? A number of ways. I mean, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, of course, are engineered ruses by parents, and they provide certain kind of evidence, right, to persuade kids. Right.

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 reasonably well. I think that's why he's so contagious and hangs in there pretty well. So it's a good comparison. But how is it different? He doesn't account for the design and purpose we see in the natural world. So he doesn't sort of tick that box. He's not as satisfying.

He doesn't account for all kinds of meaning making that we tend to do as we start to get a little bit older. We have that uncomfortable evidence that we find that it was our parents at a certain point when it was. 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. 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 four-year-old walked in one day and said, God is everywhere all the time. And we're atheists, so we have no idea where this came from. And we try to figure it out, and I just don't know where this came from. This is a true story, actually. And then this developmental psychologist actually told me, and a year later, I believe it was, she still believes in God.

And God is an elderly woman. I found that was an interesting detail because it suggested that it wasn't normal enculturation either. It wasn't that brainwashing so forth, because that wouldn't have been the brainwashing that would have been going on. 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 are.

So the comparison with Father Christmas and Tooth Fairy is a nice one because it shows both similarities and differences. There are detractors, of course, many of them. 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.

You've been criticised by none other than AC Grayling. I mean, you know you've hit the big time when AC Grayling has a word or two to say about you. You're a wishful thinker. 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 royal criticism from the silver-haired boffin? LAUGHTER

You know, I like when I get a criticism from a smart person, I want to really look at how much of it is true. Because 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. Even 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 general outlines to, say, Jesse Bering, who is an atheist.

developmental and evolutionary psychologist, and Pascal Boyer, who is also not a religious person at all. Scott Atrin has made us some lurking. 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.

So I don't think it's just my biases 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. If I'm fudging 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. So it's really it's I don't know. I'll let you know, let the science fall where it will.

If religiousness is such a natural state of affairs, why do so many people walk away from it? And in our culture today, so many people are not religious. Yeah. I'm going to do that annoying sort of academic thing and say, well, first, I don't think as many people walk away from being religious 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 contexts 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, simultaneously belief in spiritism and the occult has been on the rise. Belief in ghosts has been going up, other kinds of new age things.

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 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, buts.

But yes, but Barrett, there are these people who aren't doing that stuff, at least as far as we can tell. I think that's right. 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. People are disillusioned from various scandals and inadequacies. And I think those are the sorts of things that organized religious folks need to take seriously.

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, OK, we need to do better, they're going to attract those people back into maybe another religion. It's certainly the case that we live in an era now of greater access to religion.

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

They're these sort of scientific and philosophical kinds of accounts that maybe they sort of erode those a bit. And I'm going to bank on those for now. Well, why am I doing that? Lots of personal motivations get in there. Yeah.

And one of the things that is an exciting area of scientific inquiry right now is the scientific study of atheism is starting to pick up for just the reasons you're raising. And so it's premature for me to give a solid answer, 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.

Well, yeah, I was about to say, I remember interviewing Olivera Petrovich from Oxford years ago, and she had found in surveys she'd conducted that about half of the self-affirmed atheists

on follow-up interviews, admitted they did believe in some grand mind behind the universe, they just don't think of it as God. Let me interrupt myself for a second to share a snippet of that interview I did with Dr Petrovic, courtesy of my mates at the Centre for Public Christianity. One of the things that struck me with adults was that many more of them, more adults than children, are

sort of prepared to present their position as being an atheist. They simply do not think that God plays a part somewhere where children think so immediately. When I try to establish what exactly they mean by God, what kind of a concept they have, as I do with children, it turns out that you really need to be very careful

about this because adults tend to use very idiosyncratic criteria, assuming that everybody else has a certain concept of God whereas theirs is different. So they would tell me, "I'm an atheist because I just don't believe in God as a man sitting in the sky, but I believe in some sort of spirit, energy, intelligence."

and so on. So that, I mean, a child couldn't tell you that, but of course no child believes that God is a man in the sky. That's the interesting thing as well. The importance of asking people, of getting data from people

from people directly under sort of very clear conditions is absolutely... It cannot be overstated, let me put it that way. So there may be even fewer real atheists than the survey suggests? I'm inclined to really suspect that to be the case.

That's right. That's right. No, absolutely. I mentioned Jesse Bering earlier, 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 he's actually been one of the more vocal scholars in this area, claiming that atheists, at least many atheists, still believe.

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.

this isn't just some accident that we're all here. We still have those intuitions that sort of leak through. And so at least his view is there are actually very few completely satisfied, intellectually consistent atheists. And he would even count himself in that, I think. Maybe he's overstating it a bit, but he's sort of a provocative guy, but

This certainly seems to be the case. Just like there are plenty of religious people who are not sort of settled in an intellectual way, sort of consistent either, if we're really honest about these things. 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'd 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% 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 next season.

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 chapter 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 to 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 are 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 chapter 10 that people were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them.

This is really interesting. Ordinarily, children weren't really meant to be seen in public. So 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, when Jesus saw this, he was indignant. This is a really strong word, aganaktea. It's like our word, outrage. He 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.'"

Elsewhere, we get a similar teaching. In Matthew 18, Jesus has this 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.

But 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 actually. 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 realization 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 recognize 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. Returning to the what seems well-evidenced thesis that kids naturally incline toward belief in God or gods, wouldn't that

explain away religion? 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, that we have just evolved to have this weird habit of inventing gods.

Yeah, I understand 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 we have lots of early evolving intuitions and thought tendencies, early developing in childhood that seem to be part of our evolutionary heritage. There's a perfectly good evolutionary account of why we think that our mothers love us.

So does that mean we shouldn't think our mothers love us? Well, that doesn't seem right. 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 proper function like if we

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 on those conditions, I should be suspicious Well are these beliefs in God's that those kinds of beliefs? It's not obvious that they are unless you've already decided there are no gods and that's called begging the question. I

In December 2017, the Pew Research Center conducted a really interesting study about what Americans mean when they say they do or don't have religion. Unlike most surveys that simply 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 pretty spiritual beliefs. Among the key findings is that 17% of Americans fall into this nuns category, no religion. But on follow-up, most of the nuns, 72% of them, say they do believe in God or a higher spiritual power. It's incredible.

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 decided to follow up with a question. This 19% who don't believe in God were asked to clarify whether, quote, 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 in fact 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 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 nuns. That's N-O-N-E-S. I suspect it would probably bear out the same thing. 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, Psalm 19, that the creation itself points to God's eternal power and divine nature, Romans 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 higher spiritual powers and omniscient loving beings, 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. Hey, I hope you don't mind if I raise something I'm a little embarrassed about. This pod is part of a larger Undeceptions project, researching, writing, and speaking to let the truth about Christianity out. And I'd love your help to make it thrive.

I'm able to do this full-time currently because a small group of benefactors keep Undeceptions afloat. You know who you are, and I'm really thankful. Even with the Eternity Network and our show sponsors, the podcast doesn't even pay for itself, let alone all the other writing and speaking projects.

So if you're listening and you want to help Undeceptions bust some more myths and promote the truth and beauty of the Christian faith in public, I'd love your support. Head to undeceptions.com and hit the donate button. We've made it especially large and obvious so you can't miss it. No amount is too small. Anything you can do is really appreciated. Thanks so much.

And while you're there, feel free to send us a question, and we'll try to answer it in a later episode. And if you're interested in other good podcasts, check out Salt, Conversations with Jenny Salt, part of the Eternity Podcast Network. Next episode? Well, there are lots of places you can learn what the Bible teaches. We're going to show how this sausage was made—forgive me for saying that, Lord—

We're doing the true history of how the Bible came together. It was a late 4th century political power grab, wasn't it? See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne, and directed by Mark Hadley. Editing by Mark Hadley. Special thanks to Mark Hadley.

Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Before you go, one of our listeners loved last week's episode on atonal music and what it tells us about the world and our place in it. So he sent us this little tribute to Discord. He grabbed our theme tune, pulled out his keys, and created what he calls Dark Jazz Undeceptions by Andrew Judd. See ya. ♪

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