Born Believers - why children naturally believe in God

Against the Grain
Books that run against the grain of contemporary thinking are not easy to find, so when this book came out in 2012 it stood out among the approximately 2 million volumes published each year.

In a nutshell, the author says that little children are born hard-wired to believe in God. 

The author's case can be summarised as follows:

Step 1: Children are able to distinguish between agents and non-agents. Children know if "something" can organise, initiate, and bring order out of chaos - it knows if something is an "agent". A rolling ball is clearly not an agent, but the human being who rolled the ball is.

Step 2: Everything in the world is made by agents. Children realise that everything they come across in the home, shopping mall, grandma's house and playgroup, is made by an agent. Cars, prams, cups, ipads, chairs, absolutely everything is "made".

Step 3: Humans can't make everything. Little children realise the limits of human agents. Humans can only make artifacts, small things, limited things, relatively simple things.

Step 4: Therefore there must be a God. Because there are mountains and stars and planets and plants and trees and animals - which clearly weren't made by humans - there must be Another Agent who made them - there must be a God who made them.

Eminently reasonable and perfectly automatic!

The human brain comes pre-wired with forensic software

This "forensic" thinking is not taught to a child, it is prewired and perfectly naturally. God has given to every human being the forensic software which comes to all sorts of reasonable and logical conclusions such as the one above.

What happens when children grow up?
If this is the conclusion of little children, how do we explain the fact that as children grow up some of them reject God?

Some might argue that the simple forensic software of a child gives way to the more sophisticated software of the adult mind.

The Scriptures teach something very different. They teach that adults all know there is a God in exactly the same way that little children do. From the created world around them, their minds continue to automatically deduce the existence of a powerful and glorious God.

But they do turn away from that Creator God. They don't turn away from "gods" for they still feel the deep need for greater things in their lives, a greater "Something" that makes life worth living. This new replacement "Something" becomes family, money, hobby, pleasure, career - anything, in fact, "higher" which makes life worth living.

People do not turn away from "gods" - their lives are filled with "gods" - which the Bible calls idols. But they do turn away from the Creator God they know made the heavens and the earth. Why?

Here's the reason: to acknowledge that there is a Creator would have vast implications. They would have to obey him, they would have to thank him, they would have to consult him. And that is what they do not want to do. Their lives are in rebellion against God. The Bible calls this rebellion "sin." Because they do not want to change their lives, grown up men and women suppress the knowledge of God refusing to acknowledge him any more.

(This, of course, is dangerous to their brains, because they are damaging the logical faculties they possess. If you suppress the truth in one area of reality it is likely you will suppress the truth in other areas. If you wilfully deny the truth, you damage your ability to process any truth. Sure enough "Professing themselves to be wise they became fools." An amazing example of this is the widespread western view that chimps are clever. So determined are some people to prove that humans are just next in evolutionary line to chimps, they force themselves to believe that chimps are clever  in spite of all the evidence that chimps are chumps - or more to the point - that human beings rise infinitely above chimps in absolutely everything: only the wilfully blind cannot see this.)

Do adults believe in God? Yes, their reasoning faculties cry out just as much as when they were kids - in fact even more so. But they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

The limits of apologetics
For this reason, apologetics - the art of defending Christian truth - is very limited. It is necessary but limited. Only the almighty power of God can change the human heart from one of unbelief to belief.