semantics, debate-pointsI have heard an atheist claim that babies are born atheists.
Is there any truth to that claim?
If you define atheism as “the lack of belief in a god” then, obviously, it is true that babies are born atheist. However, it would be fallacious to ascribe any meaning to that. In fact, giving any meaning to that fact would have disastrous consequences.
The logic could be phrased as such:
However, you can use that logic to reach preposterous conclusions like:
If the logic used to give any meaning to the fact that babies are born “atheist” is considered seriously, then most objects or beliefs that we hold as true do not exist either. Thus, while it’s true that babies are not born with an innate belief in god, it does not mean anything.
Any reasoning you would use to reach a different conclusion would be fallacious.
When “Are babies born atheist?” is asked, it’s not really asking “Does an infant who doesn’t realize her toes are attached to her believe in an omnipotent deity?” but more “Are we as a species born into our parents’ religion by default, or are we all tabulae rasae? Is all religion learned?” I think the answer to that question is yes, all religion is learned, because we are all born without it.
So babies are all born without religion, and children (that is, babies who have grown enough to be sentient) have to be taught it. We are atheists by default. We have to be instructed in fairy tales in order to believe in them.
Not sure what the answer would be from developmental psychology perspective.
Do babies at an early level of development see the mother as sort of a hazy deity, who provides food and warmth? At which stage do they grasp the concept that anything exists apart from what they immediately perceive or remember?
If we define atheism as belief that god does NOT exist, then, obviously, babies are not atheists, since they can’t articulate such a specific belief.
Babies, when they are born, don’t apparently have a concept of self. I think pondering about their atheism is pretty silly. Though sometimes pondering silly questions can be fun. :)
“Babies are born atheist” is a nice catch-phrase, but it should not be taken literally. it’s point is clearly not whether babies actually are atheists or not, but to point out that religion is not a given, but rather comes from indoctrination (or introduction if you’d prefer not be confrontational…)
I think yes, babies are born atheist, in the sense that they do not believe in any god.
This may seem an obvious and irrelevant thing to say, but it isn’t. I am not that interested in why this is important from a psychological or philosophical perspective, but from a social and cultural perspective: I find it very important when confronted with the claims of religious parents and organised religions who label babies and children as “Christian” or “Muslim” or whatever. That kind of labeling is abusive and unfair, since babies are neutral to religion; it’s only their parents who shoehorn them into whatever their beliefs are. Dawkins has described this as a kind of child abuse, and I concur.
So, in summary, yes, babies are born atheist, and this is not a silly thing to say or take into account.
This is a great question. 1 line. No convoluted qualifications or secondary questions. Well done.
Basic facts of Birth: To be a theist, one has to assert beliefs about God. A baby, incapable of assertions and clearly having not acquired any beliefs at birth, is born “atheist.” A (not) theist. An atheist is not required to state/define/assert what they do not believe in, in order to be an atheist. All you have to do is have a worldview that does not include “god” or “theism” as an explanatory construct. I’d say this fits the bill for babies.
Does the Baby have to Know or Believe? Many question answerers have implied that awareness of what one believes is a requirement of being an atheist. Again we see the bizarre, pejorative vestiges of the “A” word being a creation of theists, to be applied to “others; not us.” I would NOT say that being able to acknowledge one’s atheism is a requirement of being an atheist. All you need is to not be a theist.
Learned traits vs. Evolutionary Agency Detection: Interesting path here, but again I would submit that if you answer the question as asked, you have to say babies are born atheist. The question is not, “Is a tendency toward religious thinking, or theism, hard-wired into us by evolution?” Yes, babies may be born with incredibly hard-wired tendencies to make overgeneralized causal conclusions, see agency where none is present, badly estimate probabilities, be solipsistic and hence feel like a special creation… but all of that only LEADS to being a theist, and not all people fall prey to our cognitive biases. You can become a theist, but we are all born atheists. Not theists.
Here's what the site Born Atheist says: (link text
Born atheist. On one level, it is a literal statement. Atheism means a lack of belief in deities. All children are born without a belief in deities, therefore they are born atheist.
But religionists can point to alternative dictionary definitions that say atheism means a belief there are no gods. That definition requires cognition, beyond the scope of most newborns. But back and forth arguments about the definition of "atheist" ignore the broader implications of the term "born atheist."
Just as Nietzsche did not mean "god is dead," to be taken literally–that a deity existed, he was mortal and he died; so too, the term "born atheist" has meaning beyond its literal definition.
First, "born atheist" is a statement of atheist pride. People who use it are out, loud and proud atheists.
Further, "born atheist" implies that atheism is a natural state. If everyone is born atheist, then religion is learned and can be unlearned. People who use the term "born atheist" will likely be amused to hear religion described as a social virus.
Finally, people who use the term "born atheist" are willing to stand up to the religious majority. Believing that atheism is a natural state and religion is a social virus, born atheists actively challenge the assumptions of the religious majority.
Obviously they aren’t born believing in a particular deity, god with a capital “G”. Although a theist would argue that, but no need to go there. In “The Gospel of Inclusion”, Carlton Pearson says that he believes people naturally tend toward pantheism. I’m not sure if he has any references for that, but it has always made sense to me. It is pretty much where religion started out, historically speaking.
The internal dialog that Holden Caulfield has in “Catcher in the Rye” is probably pretty accurate for what young people go through when they are trying to figure what god is, or what his real name is.
I think science has to be learned. We have to learn that our direct observations can lead us to inaccurate conclusions, that the easiest person to fool is ourselves as Feynman said. It doesn’t seem natural to me that we would ask people to recreate our experiments and confirm our results. We only do that now, since we have discovered so many amazing things using that method.
This is all opinion. I don’t know of any study or science on belief in infant brains. You could look up Piaget for interesting social psychology on children.
EDIT: I have seen this on a couple other answers elsewhere in this SE:
first, religion in its metaphysical or theological sense (e.g., the underlying truth of the existence of God, the dharma, etc.); second, religion as it is psychologically experienced by people (e.g., the feelings of the religious believer about divinity or ultimate concerns, the holy, etc.); and third, religion as a cultural or social force (e.g., symbolism that binds a community together or separates it from other communities). Definitions of religion typically begin by assuming one of these three different theoretical approaches -T. Jeremy Gunn 2003,2008
and have discussed in “meta” that it might be worth applying this to many questions. So here goes. The above can be summarized as
Religion is either one of these or a combination
Most answers seem to be referring to 1 or 3. Both require something to be learned, so obviously they can’t apply to babies, so babies are obviously atheist. The questioner would have to clarify if this is what they meant.
If the quesitioner is asking about #2, it gets more interesting (IMHO). We can’t know everything about infant psychology, but we have some sense that they feel love and wonder and a connection to their mother. It seems pretty obvious that children have more of a proclivity to believe since they go for the Santa Claus story pretty easily and have imaginary friends. Sunday School teachers know about this and exploit it.
I could go on, but I’ll wait for clarification on what the question actually is.
I think trying to give babies a “belief” is preposterous, they aren’t at the stage where they can process thoughts such as belief. Babies aren’t born atheist because babies aren’t born anything other than babies. It’s like trying to suggest that all babies think in spanish, they aren’t at a stage where they can articulate anything beyond the initial primal instincts i.e. need for food, warmth and care etc.
Based on a three prong, polythetic definition of religion, babies can be born atheist, or Jewish or Christian.
Yes, a child can be a born atheist, or for that matter be a born Hindu, Jew, or Christian without ever knowing the name of their particular savior or whether God exists.
Truth is that this is an unknown. We don’t know what kind of beliefs, if any, babies have. It is plausible that the very idea of God(s) stems from instinctive tendencies to assert intent on events that where caused without any.
Does the dog barking at the tree branch that just fell, because it thinks someone or some intentional thing must have made that happen, count as a superstitious response? The dog would appear to believe that some actor is there when there in fact is none. Is it equivalent to human beings talking about various spirits and gods that perform similar acts?
If the dog can believe in spirits, can’t a baby?
I have distinct memories of talking to a boy that did not actually exist when I was very young (I can remember further back than most). I had not yet learned about spirits and gods and such.
I was also afraid of the monster goat thing that always used to stare at me from my parents’ bedroom doorway but always seemed to remain hidden during the day.
I used to believe that my blanket protected me from the monsters coming down from the ceiling at night.
Seems to me that I had a lot of considerably supernatural theories about how the world around me operated as far back as I can recall, which again is considerably greater than most. Can someone who believes in non-existing people, invisible goat monsters, and the ineffable power of a security blanket be considered an atheist?
I’m a new user and have signed up specifically because of this issue which I’ve been trying to debate, without too much success, on a religious site. I’ve not, therefore, read all the contributions to this yet but will do.
However, I come down firmly against this propostion and think that saying babies are born non-theistic is a much more accurate way of putting it. I’m hoping others will respond.
I’d have to say that they are babies are not born atheists, but nor are they born theists. They do not have the capability to believe.
It’s like asking the question: “Are ideas red in color?”
If you define atheism as simply “lacking belief in God”, then technically babies are atheist. But so is my cat. By that definition, babies (and cats) are also a-Darwinist, in that they also lack belief in Darwinian evolution.
So essentially, labeling an infant as “atheist” may have some linguistic merit, but it’s an utterly useless description. It doesn’t tell us anything about the validity of atheism.
A more useful definition of atheism is the rejection of theism. In that sense, babies are not atheists, because they are not cognitively capable of understanding theism well enough to reject it.
The claim is a catch-phrase to mean that religion is a learned concept. It would be interesting to perform the following (completely unethical!) experiment. Take a city, isolate it culturally from the rest of the world and never teach the babies any religion.
A interesting related digression is the modeling of religion as meme (i.e. a metaphysical gene).
Depends on what you mean by ‘Atheist’. The word is used to describe 2 basic cases (and some others) :
(1) refusing the God’s existance - widely used, especially by theists.
(2) absence of belief
The question doesn’t have a single ‘correct’ answer defined in the literature in the (true/false) form, and it depends on a person’s belief. One can believe babies or fetuses are aware of God, or not. So one can describe the word as (1), (2), and agree it or not.
To what I see the common agreement is babies are not atheists, due to most people either
or;
Personally:
I believe all feelings and knowledge are related to biochemistry, hormones, synapses, and they are all consequences of the mollecular structure of the ovum and physical effects from the environment. I believe the existing knowledge of a new born is a consequence of physical structure of the brain and the body, like a water drop finding its way to the sea. And that existing, hard-wired information in humans gives us a high ‘tendency and need’ to believe in a holy being. That’s probably related with the need for protection and is probably a part of what binds babies to their parents.
I’m an atheist and I use the word for the meaning (1), so I don’t agree; to me babies are not atheists.
In my opinion, you can ask if somebody believes only if this person is capable of understanding the idea. So when you ask “Are babies born atheist?”, you must refer to a baby or a person at the proper age who never heard of an idea of god, and then if this person develops this idea by itself.
When you look at our history, every civilization (small or great) have always had its gods or ghosts, protectors etc. So I say NO! Most people are born theists. And NO, I dont consider it a proof for existence of god.
When babies are born, they might be aware of something. or, might be not.
but seriously, are babies aware of the existence of god? were you?
I don’t remember.
Ask one, and report back what they say.
Actually, I know what they’ll say: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!”
But seriously, how could you ever know?
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