Is it true that we're all born atheists?

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Not a single human child is born believing in God. Not one. A person who does not believe in God is by definition an atheist.

I agree with Campin Cat that there is no contradiction.

If you're convinced that God created us in his image then naturally your God is going to put us in the center of creation, and he is going to put all of those lights in the sky into motion around us for our benefit. And there were no competing ideas about basic cosmology around anyway to challenge the notion until only the last few Centuries of Christian history.

And then when Galileo and Copernicus finnally did push the earth out of the center of the universe it made it look like maybe we werent the center of creation after all. It was just the first of a series of scientific discoveries that would push man farther and farther from the center of creation.

There is a whole industry of tin hatters on U Tube who tell us that this whole heliocentric universe, and round earth thing is one big conspiracy to get us to loose faith in God. Some folks STILL havent recovered from Galileo!

Oh, okay----I don't really know that much about multi-theist beliefs, except for the Hindus; and, it is MY understanding, that even some of THEM believe in an "over-all God" (ONE God over all the other however many gods they believe-in).

As for "science", "without a doubt", and "physical world"..... First-of-all, I don't think science has even BEGUN, maybe, to understand ALL. Secondly, maybe science will NEVER be able to prove the existence of a God (or, godS, in your case), "without a doubt"----maybe, because there will ALWAYS be somebody saying: "There's no PROOF". Thirdly, assuming when you said "physical world", you were including God, in that----I'm thinking it's quite possible that those of us who are "assigning" a PHYSICAL "value" to God, may have fallen into a "trap", of sorts. It's possible that we have, maybe, either taken that "I made you in my own image" part, a little too literally, and / OR those that teach "The Word" may have played-up that part, to ensure our understanding / following of God. I mean, as far as *I* know, there does not exist, ANYWHERE in The Bible, a PHYSICAL description of God. Also, I know Jesus used the term "my Father", often----but, what if we are defining "Father", wrongly; because, again, we are applying what WE know to be the definition of "father"----what if it simply means CREATOR----or, what if the writers / translators of The Bible PURPOSELY made it sound like a physical being / attached a word to it ("father") so that we would understand, and God is NOT a physical being, at all! (I'm not saying you are wrong, BTW----it's just a thought.)

I don't think we're born atheists or theists. I think we're born with no opinion, or even inclination on the matter, whatsoever. I think the culture around us influences whichever religious stance we initially take in childhood.

My father's parents are Jewish, so I was born vaguely within the religion, but the truth is my surroundings were so Christian that my view of God was a straight up Christian one. Of course, when I was a small child I also believed in Santa, so that's not saying much. My belief in Santa ended when a friend in the first or second grade told me he didn't exist; I yelled at him, then went home and thought about it, and realized he was right. Like Santa, my belief in God was ended by something innocuous - in Hebrew school the teachers told me the garden of Eden and Noah's arc were literally true, which seemed so ridiculous to me that at 11 I dropped out and declared myself an atheist (this didn't prevent me from begging God for mercy every time I had bad gas). By high school I'd become an anti-theist, but all that ended when I was about 20 and read Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is such a childish, insulting book and so beneath Dawkins' achievements as a biologist that I basically rejected the movement.

In the last few years I've actually done a lot of religious exploration. In many traditions I've found a recurring philosophy of pantheism (which has been called "sexed up atheism", but whatever) and "religious naturalism" that is really appealing. It's basically the idea that everything in the universe is connected, and that we're one small part of a larger system that we can never be disconnected from. This makes death less scary, because it basically says everything we are, and everything we value and love, will continue on long after we and everyone we know dies. The things in art we love, the power of our unique and personal relationships, all continue because they're parts of reality. Zen monks have explained this as the universe is an ocean, and we're the waves - the idea that a wave is independent from the rest of the ocean's water is an illusion. Atheistic philosophers and thinkers like Spinoza believe this, as does the Soto Zen tradition, Sufism (which asserts god is within everything and all of us, and we are just one part of god), Taoism, and more abstractly/loosely in everything from Quakerism (which says we need to "listen" to God and the world around us, and we will be guided) to Sikhism to the more existentialist end of Jewish philosophy. If you see God as a name for the united universe, then the question of whether or not he exists becomes ridiculous and irrelevant.

...Knows only God . (Sentences ran backward...)

LOL----that's TRUE!! LOL

(Pssst, God help 'em when they hear science's theory regarding MULTIPLE universes! LOL)

BORING!! ! The O.P. wants the truth about what a baby thinks, not you.

What you know as you was not there. You were different then. If you knew the truth, you would be able to remember it. But you don't, because you can't. You don't even remember how you thought. A baby just is.

THERE IS NO INTERNAL DIALOG! LIKE ALL OF THE STUFF YOU ARE READING IN THIS POST! IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT A BABY BELIEVES, YOU MUST STOP WITH THE INCESSANT CLAMMERING, AND TURN OFF YOUR INTERNAL DIALOG.

I will tell you what I KNOW. Some athiest crackpot came up with this ludicrous idea that babies are born athiest.

It doesn't mean anything.

Athiesm is on the island of the tonal. It has no bearing in a babies mind.

I was going to ask this yesterday but forgot. Are you saying you can't rule out some sort of pantheistic deism or saying that for all you know there might be some obscure Polynisian deity of Mercury or Venus that you haven't had exposure to that might connect? Only reason I ask - I'd think gods and goddess, as a genre, probably should be something people could make a pretty quick decision on based on exposure to maybe a handful of monotheisms and polytheisms. Reading about every single one that's ever existed might be enriching but I don't know that I'd call someone presumptuous having read a little about Greek/Roman deities, Egyptian, Nordic, a fair amount of Judao-Christian and Islamic awareness under their belt who's suggest that the ideas of deity or a deity doesn't make sense to them.

I think a couple things have been elucidated over the course of this thread:

1) Almost no one would consider a baby making a theological decision - they're too busy trying to figure out how to filter information, coordinate neurological resources to interact with the world, and figuring out how to interact with mom to have any interest in theology.

2) Those claiming that we're all born atheists are going a definition with includes both people who've made a firm decision that there are no deities and people who haven't yet had the chance to affirm a belief in a deity - the later extends to both babies and I'm sure any of the severly handicapped who were not able to acquire language communication skills. For better or worse (I'd tend toward the later) this is the definition that is endorsed by the more authoritative dictionaries available.

I'd agree that it's in a lot of ways boring and meaningless, aside from getting exposure to some rather angular ideas on both what babies think or don't think on the topic as well as debating definitions of atheism. My take on it this far in - especially when obfuscation of the issue is embedded, as someone suggested earlier, in hundreds of years of English language construction - this is just a classic example of dialogue breaking down over words as well as words being used in misleading ways whether under formal authority or otherwise.

Infants and young children have no opinion on God, so that makes them agnostics.

But they didn't decide to become agnostics through conscious thought.

I wouldn't consider them agnostics.

I'm at least glad that Merriam Webster just keeps with definition 1. I don't know how much more or less authoritative it is than Oxford but:

I would say if any gods exist it would be in some kind of spirit world so what I'd wonder is if it's possible for something that doesn't exist in the physical sense to influence the physical world or not and to what extent. I imagine an athiest wouldn't even consider the concept of any kind of spirit world(or dimension) existing...because essentially our science cannot prove one way or the other at least not at this point.

Leaves me with not knowing one way or the other. Though I did have one experience in the past that convinced me 'something' exists but then again it could have just been a very, very vivid dream. But I was convinced I saw a translucent woman floating in my room with long hair, a white gown and I believe some kind of leaf crown on her head and she was holding a glowing orb and there was something frightening about her so I hid under my blankets...it was a long time ago when I was 11 and I was convinced It was not a dream at the time.

The tonal, and the nagual is the best way I can describe how a baby thinks. It is not in any language books that I know of. It is ancient knowledge derived from Indians of the Americas (southern/central). It teaches you to see things differently than your ordinary reality.

I guess I can say that if you really understand the ways of a baby, you would have to be an indian.

Aside from their top priority to get their lives up and running I would think of them as fundamentally receptive. To try on a mystical scope of how they might see the world I'd guess it's probably not too different from some of the deeper reaches of our subconscious minds now that aren't particularly adulterated by human inculturation. I tend toward a panpsychic panentheism myself so I would think of the subconscious type of structure and the highly symbolic mode of operation as being what's most common to the universe rather than inductive/discursive reasoning like we use regularly. Thus the baby would be much more in conformity to the universe in how it thinks and feels than the adult (and this may well be that way for most higher mammals to varying degrees).