| Jay520 said: People aren't born with any philosophical beliefs. Belief in God is a philosophical belief. People are born without a belief in God. Atheism is the lack of belief in God. Thus, people are born atheists. Atheism is the default position for everyone. |
That might not be necessarily true, even from a strictly logical and scientific point of view.
In some sense we are born with "beliefs" ingrained in our brain, because having some basic tool for knowledge proved useful and was selected in Darwinian terms. For example we basically are all born empiricists, and we basically by default believe that tomorrow the world will work by the same basic rules as today.
On the subject, see Dennet's "Breaking the spell: religion as a natural phenomenon". Basic idea: we evolved with brains that are finally attuned to understanding the intentions of conscious agents, as it is greatly useful to have predictive capacities about their future behavior. Just as our great innate ability in reading facial expressions leads us to mistakingly see faces in the patterns of clouds, rock shapes and wood knots, so this ability of ours to infer conscious intentions might have been misused, and led us to see agents in inanimate natural phenomena. A thunderstorm becomes an expression of anger, the sun loves us if it useful for our needs and so on... We populate the world with spirits, and then with gods.
It's a really great book, check it out. Point being, though, that it's not true that we are born as tabula rasa... We actually have to work and educate ourselves to logical, abstract and scientific reasoning.
