Children are born believers in God

Very interesting finding, reported by Telegraph.co.uk

Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.

He says that young children have faith even when they have not been taught about it by family or at school, and argues that even those raised alone on a desert island would come to believe in God.

For what it's worth, I would like to share some of my personal experiences. Around the time when I was 10 (which I can date with some precision, based on where our family lived at that moment) I was preoccupied with the idea of universal determinism (obviosly, I knew no such terms). The world seemed to me a giant wind-up mechanism where every event was pre-programmed. On occasion, I entertained the notion that because of my own free will I can change some events in the future and thus prove this deterministic world order at least partially flawed. Then it occurred to me that my own understanding of the world may also had been pre-programmed, and my seemingly free-will-based attempt to thwart determinism was nothing but determinism in disguise. Admittedly, the idea of a Creator was not manifest in these musings, but it was very much implied.