The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

climate of fear and ignorance. And atheists and believers alike see children generally as acquiring religion from outside sources. But are children’s minds really the religious tabula rasae we make them out to be? Or rather, are human beings, in some sense, born believers?
     
     
    Scientists would be hard-pressed to find and interview feral children who’ve been reared in a cultural vacuum to probe for aspects of quasi-religious thinking. In reality, the closest we may ever get to conducting this type of thought experiment is to study the few accounts of deaf-mutes who, allegedly at least, spontaneously invented their own cosmologies during their prelinguistic childhoods. In his book The Child’s Religion (1928), the Swiss educator Pierre Bovet recounted that even Helen Keller, who went deaf and blind at nineteen months of age from an undiagnosed illness, was said to have instinctively asked herself, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?”
    Such rare accounts of deaf-mute children pontificating about Creation through some sort of internal monologue of nonverbal thought—thought far removed from any known cultural iterations or socially communicated tales of Genesis—are useful to us because they represent the unadulterated mind at work on the problem of origins. If we take these accounts at face value, the basic existential problem of reasoning about our purpose and origins would appear not to be the mental poison of religion, society, or education, but rather an insuppressible eruption of our innate human minds. We’re preoccupied with why things are. Unlike most people, these deaf-mute children—most of whom grew up before the invention of a standardized symbolic communication system of gestures, such as American Sign Language (ASL)—had no access to the typical explanatory balms of science and religion in calming these bothersome riddles. Without language, one can’t easily share the idea of a purposeful, monotheistic God with a naive child. And the theory of natural selection is difficult enough to convey to a normal speaking and hearing child, let alone one who can do neither. These special children were therefore left to their own devices in making sense of how the world came to be and, more intriguingly, in weaving their own existence into the narrative fabric of this grand cosmology.
    In an 1892 issue of The Philosophical Review, William James, brother to the novelist Henry James and himself arguably the world’s most famous psychologist of his era (some years later, he would write the classic Varieties of Religious Experience ), penned an introduction to the autobiographical account of one such deaf-mute, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella. “I have Mr. d’Estrella’s permission,” James tells us, “to lay before the readers of The Philosophical Review a new document which is most interesting by its intrinsic content.” 13 For uncertain reasons (perhaps literary), D’Estrella writes of his early childhood in the third person, but it’s indeed a remarkably eloquent and beautifully composed piece of work. Born in 1851 in San Francisco to a French-Swiss father he never met and a Mexican mother who died when he was five years old, D’Estrella grew up as an orphan raised by his mother’s short-tempered best friend—another Mexican woman who, judging by her fondness for whipping him over the slightest misdeeds, apparently felt burdened by his frustratingly incommunicative presence.
    With no one to talk to otherwise, and only wordless observations and inborn powers of discernment to guide his naive theories of the world, D’Estrella retreated into his own imagination to make sense of what must have been a very confusing existential situation. For example, he developed an animistic theory of the moon that hints at the egocentric nature of children’s minds, particularly with respect to morality:
    He wondered why the moon appeared so regularly. So he thought that she must have come out to see him alone.