Humans are naturally predisposed to believe in gods and life after death, according to a major three-year international study.
Led by two academics at Oxford University, the £1.9 million study found that human thought processes were “rooted” to religious concepts.
But people living in cities in highly developed countries were less likely to hold religious beliefs than those living a more rural way of life, the researchers found.
The project involved 57 academics in 20 countries around the world, and spanned disciplines including anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.
It set out to establish whether belief in divine beings and an afterlife were ideas simply learned from society or integral to human nature.
One of the studies, from Oxford, concluded that children below the age of five found it easier to believe in some “superhuman” properties than to understand human limitations.
Children were asked whether their mother would know the contents of a closed box. Three-year-olds believed that their mother and God would always know the contents, but by the age of four, children start to understand that their mothers were not omniscient.
Separate research from China suggested that people across different cultures instinctively believed that some part of their mind, soul or spirit lived on after death.
The co-director of the project, Professor Roger Trigg, from the University of Oxford, said the research showed that religion was “not just something for a peculiar few to do on Sundays instead of playing golf”.
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