Born believers?

So I am reading the 'God Edition' of the New Scientist. I was interested in an article by Justin Barrett (Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary in California). I am just going to write down some of his thoughts, so that I can make sense of them.

"Music usually has to be drummed into us by teaching, repitition and practice. And yet in other domains, such as language or walking, virtually everybody is natural; we are all "born speaker" and "born walkers". So what about religion? Is it more like music or language?"

JB argues that religion comes to us as naturally as language. He says that we are naturally inclined to find religious claims and expectation attractive and easily acquired, and we can easily attain fluency in using them. JB suggests that we all share an intuition that the apparant order and design that we see in the world requires an agent to bring it about. He describes a number of studies that have been performed looking at babies and children and their responses things that they have been shown (video animations or objects that form part of their day to day existance). To make sense of the world babies divide things into 'agents' and physcial objects - agents being things that can act on their environment i.e. people, animals and gods. Some studies in children suggest that they believe that 'supernatural agents' are all seeing and all knowing compared to humans, something akin to the development of theory of mind. In his closing paragraphs he states

"children do not need to be indoctrinated to believe in god. They naturally gravite towards the idea"

JB suggests that

"these various features of developing minds - an attraction to agent-based explanations, a tendency to explain the natural world in terms of design and purpose, an assumption that others have superpowers - makes children naturally receptive to the idea that there may be one or more god which helps account for the world around them."

So children have a natural tendency towards religion but not anyone particular belief. His final words are

"the way our minds solve problems generates a god-shaped conceptual space waiting to be filled by the details of the culture into which they are born."

Human beings are complex! I found this article interesting because I spend my time learning and thinking about how children learn, assessing development in children under 5. I never really thought about religion in any of that. Which of course is odd because I spent at least two years teaching at Sunday school, the preschool children. I guess both sets of children were very different - which is why I find this so fascinating. The children in the Sunday school - could all write and tell me who God or Jesus was. Some could talk about prayer. Some would talk about Jesus as if he was a real and tangible presence in their lives/homes (which of course is the basic tenant of Christianity, so I am not so sure why I am so suprised). I, quite frankly was humbled by it all. What did I teach them - to be good to one another, to thank God for all things, as well as how to sing, draw, do puzzles, colour pictures, make pretend food to take on pretend buses to go to pretend picnics in the park. I taught them about eyes, ears, hands, feet, the job of doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, how to fish., how to pretend to fly, how to pretend to row a boat. Sunday school class is hard work but lots of fun. I never really knew how much of anything they took in and I always assumed that the children that seemed to arrive primed with a preknowledge of God and Jesus, learnt this at home from their parents. Especially since I knew, many of the parents and know that they regularly prayed for and with their children and God was very much part of their lives, not just for Sundays.

So very different from the children that come to my clinic.  I cannot speak for children whose families practice other faiths and I have never even had a conversation about faith because it is not why they come to see me. However I just wonder how 'religion' works in children whose developmental level, never really goes past that of a child of 1 or 2 years. Despite what the article above says - their needs to be some cognitive input from a child, they need to be able to process things from the outside world and express them. If they simply cannot do this - does that mean that they are not Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddist, Sikh etc? Does it really matter?