(February 19, 2015 at 12:19 pm)YGninja Wrote: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion...laims.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics...study.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...103828.htm
The first article is drawing conclusions and not explaining how he got from "children see things that were designed for a specific purpose and draw the conclusion that they were designed for a specific purpose" to "therefore this means they believe in God (notice the capital "G", which is telling).
There are a lot of conclusions that do not necessarily follow. Did this fellow publish a paper, or is he just opining?
The second two seem to be referencing the same study, which is finding what we already know, that children are likely to attribute supernatural powers to objects and people before a certain age.
Again, telling is the final sentence:
Quote:This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.
This shows a remarkable bias in their understanding of the data. They are doing some pretty intense extrapolation and ignoring the influence of religious indoctrination. Children are certainly born with an untuned ability to 'create' explanations for things that they cannot comprehend. This is obvious and easily explained. What is not obvious is the leap from this to mythical sky daddy creator-god that these studies seem to make.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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