Is Everyone Really Born an Atheist?

36 thoughts on “Is Everyone Really Born an Atheist?”

1. I love your posts keep up the good work!

   1. Thank you so much! I’m glad you are enjoying them. This one was short because I am trying to finish my honors thesis this weekend and am therefore rather preoccupied.

2. Well-reasoned, and on target-in fact, a bulls-eye!

3. Hi Spencer

   I think you are taking the claim that “everyone is born an atheist” far too literally. All it is pointing out in aphoristic shorthand is that humans are born without any beliefs as such, including without belief in God, and that beliefs gradually develop as the person matures and the implication is that religious beliefs are socially inculcated, usually in childhood by parents. Surely you can’t quarrel with that?

   Comparisons with belief in Greek pies are just silly.

   But it is true that the seemingly innate human tendency to perceive agency in apparently uncaused events is a contributing factor to the rise of religion in human culture.

   1. I was lurking on alt.atheism 20+ years ago, and there were more than a few of them who took it *exactly* that literally — it was a serious talking point, and I assume still is in some circles. If you’ve ever heard the term “deconversion”, that’s where it comes from: on this view, we are born atheists and converted to religion by our parents, hence apostasy is deconverting. To my mind, it’s basically a lazy way of putting the onus on religious apologists to prove their religion, not us to disprove it (I mean, I think that’s largely where the onus should be, but this is a poor argument for it).

   2. Well, obviously, I agree that all specific religious beliefs are socially inculcated and that no one is born already having them. Nonetheless, I don’t really see how the fact that specific religious beliefs have to be taught supports the argument that deities do not exist or the argument that society should accept atheists.

      I suppose you could try to turn it into a weak argument against an Abrahamic-style theistic creator God by arguing that such a God would naturally want to create humans preprogrammed with all the knowledge they would need to believe in him specifically and that the fact that humans don’t have this knowledge preprogrammed into them suggests that such a God does not exist.

      This argument, however, is very weak for two reasons. The first is because it only applies to an Abrahamic-style creator God, which is one specific kind of deity, and the majority of deities people have believed in throughout history have not been deities of this kind. The second reason is because it is very easy for a theist to come up with some explanation for why God might not have wanted to create humans with knowledge of him preprogrammed.

      In my opinion, the strongest argument against the existence of deities is and always will be the fact that it is impossible to make a compelling case in favor of the existence of deities, since there is no empirical evidence that can be independently and repeatedly verified and the philosophical arguments are all deeply flawed and generally riddled with fallacies.

4. Interesting topic! If one takes this argument to the next level (would someone raised without society become religious?) we have circled back to a discussion that was lively among mediaeval Islamic scholars and which led to the first “Robinsonade”, the Hayy ibn Yaqdhan/Philosophus Autodidactus

   1. That’s fascinating! I just looked the Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān up and read about it. I’m not very well versed at all in medieval Islamic literature, so I had no idea that that novel existed! The Wikipedia article about it says that an English translation of it inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I suppose this further disproves the claim I have often heard English literature snobs make that Robinson Crusoe was the first true novel ever written.

      1. Honestly, I cannot say I know much of mediaeval Islamic literature either, I only learned about it when I searched for if there were any Robinson-like castaways before the “Age of Exploration”. It is interesting that you refer to people claiming Robinson Crusoe as the first true novel, I have myself only heard of Don Quixote and The Tale of Genji being referred to as such. I guess it might be because you live in an Anglophone country and (as you imply) those who read English literature would want the first novel to be in English

         1. It is truly amazing the extent to which some English literature snobs (and I do mean snobs more than scholars, although those two categories are certainly not mutually exclusive) are able to completely ignore any literature that was not originally written in English.

            I don’t know if you’ve read it or not, but I wrote a post back in January 2020 about the question of what was the first novel. If you haven’t read it, you might enjoy it.

      2. The Tale of Genji (written the year 1000 a.d) is considered being the first novel. Which of course upsets islamic litterature snobs.

         1. Check Spencer’s article he linked above, and you’ll find that there are novels older than even it.

5. You’ve pretty much captured my thoughts on the subject, which I’ve had since, well before you were born I think ;-). Any concept of atheism broad enough to include newborns also includes my cat, and is too thin to do any useful work.

   1. Well, I’m glad to know that at least one person with some background in philosophy agrees with me!

6. I agree with you, and I’m one of those who once seriously made this argument. Along with rejecting other New Atheist associated ideas, this went too over time. You noted that they cite the “hyperactive agency detection” idea, and this contradicts this anyway, so one must be chosen. Since HAD is supported by psychology, I’d go with that anyway. As for identifying as atheist, it’s up to you of course, but my suggestion would be not to refrain just because of them. I think no one will mistake you for any obnoxious New Atheist, given your character. This atheist would certainly welcome you among our “tribe”-we need more of your ilk, not the New Atheists.

7. Another claim I’ve seen some atheists used is that agnostic atheists (like myself) aren’t a thing because they think it’s an oxymoron. I can’t speak for everyone but for me at least when it comes to the biblical god, the gods of other major religions, or ones historically worshipped I don’t accept that they ever existed. When it comes to the idea there that could exist a god or higher power, I don’t doubt the possibility, just that there’s no proof that can convince it’s a thing. Hence why I’m an agnostic atheist.

8. The work of archetypal psychologists and evolutionary psychologists, those who study the history of religion, or even history of language, all reveal that what is primary is the innate human characteristic which evolved to help us survive, and that is how we seek to find patterns and connections in phenomena around us, and from that invest them with meaning or purpose.

   Part of that is seeing, often confusing, correlation and causation.

   It is illuminating to note how in so many traditions, how “primitives” observed the primary, most obvious sign of life was breath, and of death was no breath, and how the word for breath or air became the word for the living entity and eventually for an intangible, supernatural ongoing entity .

   Words such as Nephesh ( hebrew) Espirito ( latin) Pneuma (greek) Prana (Sanskrit) Ch’i (chinese) Ki (Japanese) all originally simply meant “breath”. There are echos of some of these in common words today which keep that meaning and are quite distinct from their “spiritual” or religious meanings.

   We have “Pneumatic” and “Pneumonia”, we have “inspiration” (literally breath in), “expiration” (literally breath out) , “respiration” (breathe again); the ancient hebrews noted that with the last breath, “nephesh” left the body. They did not conceive of a spirit living beyond this life, the afterlife was not a concept belonging to early judaism and is barely there these days either ( compared to Christianity or Islam) .

   Chi and Ki are now considered “life energy” or that which animates*, but were alos similar the early Eurasian medical model of pneumatically motivated movement (as opposed to the neurological model, which was first discovered, hypothecated in the first centuries of the CE but then lost again).

   At the heart (hard to get away from metaphors!) of the yoga traditions is Prana (India) and Chi . Qi, Ki(China, Japan).

   One of the eight limbs described in Pantanjali’s Yoga sutras is Pranayama. This has also come to mean some kind of cosmic, supernatural lifeforce but it is literally, “working with breath” . As someone who has played around with yoga for over 40 years now, I can tell you that if one focuses on what is happening with your lungs and breath as one does the asanas, they take on a whole different perspective, experience. One of the physiological benefits and purposes of pranayama and other breath work is to empty the lungs of residual stale air ( CO2) and make room to fill with fresh oxygenated air. The asanas move the pressure on the lungs to constrict and free up different parts of the lungs on different sides, like squeezing and refilling different parts of a large sponge.

   * Our word “animate” comes from Latin anima. An animal is that which is self-moving, contrasted to a plant that is in held one place. We also have the word animation. The latin comes from the the Greek Anemos, which means “wind”. As air was invisible, almost magical, it was an easy connection to make that the wind which moved the trees and blew on the waters was of a similar magical force as that which gave us life as we breathed, and when we cannot breathe anymore, we cease moving.

   Another greek word that began as a physical description then became part of the vocabulary for things the intangible and non-material is “psyche” which in ancient times began as a word for “to blow” then somehow became associated with butterflies and transformation.

   In four element and five element theory of west and eastern philosophies, air and wind have always been associated with mental activity. In Buddhism, Nirvana literally means “No wind” and the metaphor is the unflickering, undisturbed flame. It has a secondary meaning of “extinguished” or “blown out”.

   Coming to God and Deity – Deity is etymologically linked to Light hence to Day. God said let there be light. The day was divided from night,. In the light we can distinguish this from that.
   Zeus (Dias) is God of lightning, which splits the dark and monetarily things can be seen. His Oracle is called is μαντείο (man-dio) – the prefix coming from PIE for ” mind”, the suffix -dio is as stated, both connected to light and to “duality” – light beign necessary to be able to discern between things.

   IMO it is certain that conceptualisations of these fundamentals – you need light to see, then understand difference (so as not walk off a cliff or into a pit) – existed long before language was developed, to be followed by religious concepts.

   (I am happy to be corrected for any errors in etymology)

9. I think this statement is perhaps too circumscribed “religion” is an imperfect *western* [sic] constructed category that can encompass various ideas and activities”, in that “religion” — I’ll define this as a set of beliefs predating contemporaries that is culturally accepted as universally applicable (at least within the tribe) and that most importantly, is embedded enough to be sustained and transmitted through succeeding generations* — because this seems to imply that non-Western “religions” are a thing apart? I’d suspect that neo-pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. would object to that.

   I thing that I notice prevalent among North American/European atheists is a reluctance to take on “eastern” religions (or even Judaism, or Islam) as directly as they do Christianity. Most of what I read are angry diatribes against conventional Christianity (or its evangelical offshoots) as if these are the standard bearers for all “religions.” I have plenty of complaints against mainstream Christianity, too — and I dare say we could all find fault with every other belief system — but confrontational atheists all too often want to tar everyone with the same brush. I’d be just as offended if I were a follower of a non-Christian doctrine when I read some things that go around.

   Not to get into a religious war (we’ve seen quite enough of those!), but I always like to cite the gentle humanist AND spiritual seeker George Harrison on the subject, when he quoted Indian gurus by saying, “If there is a God, we must perceive Him, otherwise, it’s better not to believe.” He recognized that there was no way to drag people into belief. It’s a matter of personal experience and reflection and inward questing.

   * I’d define a “religion” that doesn’t meet those criteria as a “cultus”, “cult” if you like, that is dependent on one individual’s teachings and that doesn’t have an institutional framework that maintains and sustains a doctrine beyond the lifetime of that individual.

   1. Sorry, typos abound! I forget there isn’t a post facto “edit” function here. I am not a good typist.

   2. I think you are misunderstanding what I mean when I say that “religion” is a “western constructed category.” I am not saying that people in cultures that have not conventionally been considered “western” do not believe and do things that can be classified under the category of “religion”; what I am saying is that the concept of religion as a category in itself is a relatively recent western invention.

      No one anywhere on earth prior to the sixteenth century CE had a concept of what we today call “religion.” They believed and did things that modern western people would typically label as “religion,” but they had no concept of “religion” as a discrete category of human beliefs and practice separate from the rest of life in general. For someone in ancient Greece, for instance, ideas like the existence of deities or the nature of the underworld and activities like pouring a libation to Zeus and the Olympian deities or saying a prayer to Athena or performing a play for Dionysos during the Dionysia or participating in the Eleusinian Mysteries were all just things that people believed and did. They had no concept of these activities belonging to a discrete category of “religion.”

      The concept of “religion” as a distinct category first developed in western Europe over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the wake of the violent turmoil that ensued from the Protestant Reformation. Prior to the Reformation, the Latin word religiō had always just meant something like “piety” or “scrupulosity,” but, in the wake of the bloody wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics and all the carnage and suffering those wars brought, many thinkers began to think of religiō as denoting a category of things that are best kept on their own in the personal, private sphere and they came to see the influence of religiō on public and political affairs as the cause of all the sufferings and turbulence of the post-Reformation era.

      Meanwhile and afterward, over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, western European powers exerted imperialist and colonialist influence all over the world and, as they did so, they (for the most part without consciously realizing it) promoted the concept of “religion” as a category. They came to see South and East Asian traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, et cetera as “religions” analogous to what Protestantism and Catholicism were in western Europe, even though South and East Asian peoples had no word or concept that was directly analogous to the western Latin-derived term “religion.”

      If you’re curious, the religious studies scholar Dr. Andrew Mark Henry has an excellent video on his YouTube channel “Religion for Breakfast” on the subject “Is Confucianism a Religion?” in which he discusses the problematic nature of the category of “religion” and the difficult question of whether it is appropriate to place certain non-western traditions like Confucianism into that category.

      1. Didn’t Lucretius use the word “religio” in his De Rerum Natura?

         1. Yes, but, for him, the word religio did not mean the same thing that the word religion means in English today. For Lucretius and other people of his time who spoke the Latin language, the word meant something like “scrupulosity” or “strict observance of religious rules and norms.” Thus, when Lucretius attacks religio in his De Rerum Natura, he is not like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens attacking the broad concept of everything that twenty-first-century English-speakers call “religion,” but rather attacking a much narrower concept.

10. There is this trend on social media of parents of very young children posting what they say (often obviously made up) as if it’s sage wisdom. I think the idea is (i) little Bob here is so smart for his age (ii) my platitudal political position is so clearly true that even a 3 year old can see it, so anyone who disagrees is obviously an evil moron.

    1. What you are describing reminds me very much of the famous story Herodotos tells in his Histories 2.2 about the experiment the Egyptian pharaoh “Psammetichos” (i.e., Psamtik I) supposedly conducted to find out which nation was the oldest. He writes, in A. D. Godley’s translation, with my own edits:

       “Now before Psammetichos became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on earth. But ever since Psammetichos became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest, they have believed that the Phrygians were older than they, and they than everybody else. Psammetichos, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary.”

       “Psammetichos did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling ‘Bekos!’ as he opened the door and entered. When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king’s presence as required.”

       “Psammetichos then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word ‘Bekos’ belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread. Reasoning from this, the Egyptians acknowledged that the Phrygians were older than they. This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaistos’s temple at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichos had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out.”

11. There is a distinction between “believing that …” and “believing in …”. The first refers to a possible existence/occurrence of something/someone, whereas the second expresses confidence in–or reliability of–something/someone.
    Explicit belief displayed by young children tends to be of the first kind, whereas religion (with a god) usually involves belief of the second kind (assuming implicitly that some deity exists).
    I see animism as a third way, namely the view that natural items or phenomena act on purpose. It differs from belief in a subtle way, being a not necessarily conscious view.
    “Belief” of very young children is often of the third, animistic, kind.

12. I think the point of the claim is to insinuate that belief in deities – which is to say specifically complex established systems of religious belief – must be forcefully imposed onto humans who would never reach that conclusion without compulsion.

    I.e. Religion is something people only believe in if they were cruelly forced to as ignorant and impressionable children.

13. “psychologists have long observed that human beings have an innate tendency from birth to perceive personal agents, even where none really exist”

    If I used the excuse that I believed an invisible monster was lurking in the tall grass so I couldn’t mow my lawn, no one would buy it.

    If I used the excuse that I believed an invisible monster was lurking in the sky so I had to kill unbelievers a good chunk of humanity would have no problem with that.

    Theism is a horrible choice.

14. I hadn’t ever heard this trope, seems like a glib rewrite of the “theres no atheists in a foxhole” quip.
    If I were your editor I might have suggested babies not knowing about the planet Pluto for fun

15. I’ve started to gain an appreciation for how natural “delusions” are. Shankar Vedantam (who, admittedly, is not a neuroscientist, but has spent his career interviewing neuroscientists on NPR) writes about “Useful Delusions:” beliefs that do not conform to reality, yet serve an evolutionary benefit. For instance, if you have a child, there are good odds you’ll believe that child is the most important child in the world, despite it being one of a billion. This is good for this child, and it’s good for your genes, but it does not reflect reality. It’s a delusion.

    Likewise, the role of the researcher in the field of Cognitive Science of Religion is to establish why religion is so common in humans from a lens of methodological naturalism. Does it help us cooperate more? Does it help us outcompete? How? There are really good candidates to answers to these questions, and — fancy this — the answers are never “because it’s some bullshit made up to control weak-minded people.” Pascal Boyer, Ara Norenzayan, and Azim Shariff are some names who have done fantastic work in this field, with Shariff having been on Shankar Vedantam’s podcast in one of my favorite episodes: Creating God.

    And in a nice illustration of magical thinking: if you bring up the most important child delusion to a New Atheist, they’ll assert that that sort of delusion makes sense, as it’s evolutionarily advantageous, but won’t extend that logic to religion, despite its near-universality. I’m not crazy about the whole “atheism is just a religion” thing, but this sort of special reasoning really does approach a categorization of belief.

16. The reason this argument arose was to try and counter the argument “atheism is just as faith based as religion” and “you have to prove God DOESN’T exist for atheism to be reasonable”. As far as I can see the whole “babies are atheists” argument is basically an effort to explain burden of proof and say atheism is the default state and so the burden of proof is on theists to prove their positive claims. I think that is valid though maybe you can say this analogy is a contorted way of explaining it.

    1. It’s a *lousy* way of explaining it. Someone who has never heard of God and can’t even form the concept if they were told about it (because they haven’t acquired language) is not in the same position as someone who has heard, and to some extent understood, the concept. The “default state” of humans (up to adolescence, when kids start testing the limits and becoming more independent) is to believe whatever we are taught– whether by word and example — by family and culture, because that is part of socialization. We do not start as blank slates, and we do not grow up in a vacuum.

       That being said, I think atheism is the correct null hypothesis.

17. Spencer, you gave great arguments, I mean, the pie, the planet Mars and language, of course, no one would be able to speak if someone had not shown babies how to… I loved reading your beautiful text and I am looking forward to reading more here! Best of luck on your writings!
    Ah, one more thing, now I am willing to try ‘kolokythopita’ and see if I like it or not. and maybe not only ‘kolokythopita’ LOL 😛

18. – The second reason why I think the claim that everyone is born an atheist is not correct is because it overlooks the fact that, while newborn babies obviously have no familiarity with the concept of specific deities, psychologists have long observed that human beings have an innate tendency from birth to perceive personal agents –

    Exactly! If nobody was born with an innate predisposition to believe, we would have to answer the question: “Who invented religion in the first place?”

19. Love this site Spencer! It seems to me that babies do have an innate sense of belief, in their parents/ primary careers. If then the ‘adults’push bulldust onto their kids it is only natural that belief will follow, at least until critical thinking kicks in at age 8 or later, often in the teens. To me, the deeper question is how can we educate adults, particularly those of fixed or narrow belief, to allow their children to experience a wide range of information that includes competing ideas and teach children the skills to find their own truth? After all there is absolutely no evidence for any God or gods other than personal conviction. Isn’t it time we stopped arguing these minor points of difference and just agreed that for the rational and inquiring modern mind there just isn’t any reasonable justification for any style of theism and leave it at that? Sure, the tooth fairy appeals to children, but how many believe into adulthood? If the tooth fairy was said to write a book or inspired me to write a book would that include the fairy into the pantheon of gods or would it just be patently silly like all the other gods that we believe in without evidence?

20. Ever heard of VMAT2, the so-called “God-gene”? Why has no one else commented about it?

21. Perhaps no one has mentioned it because everyone forgot about it, and anyway it seems to have been debunked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene

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