Analysis: Religious beliefs form by age 6

As early as kindergarten, people have decided whether they believe God intervenes in the world or whether the universe is a closed system of natural causes, a new study by researchers at Boston University, Harvard and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology suggests.

Published in the July issue of Cognitive Science, the study by Kathleen Corriveau, Eva Chen and Paul Harris asked 5- and 6-year-olds to identify whether the protagonists in various stories rendered in several sentences were real people or fictional ones and then provide a reason for their classifications.

Some of the stories were adapted from the Bible and included miraculous events brought about through divine intervention -- though several of the accounts got biblical details wrong. Other stories, labelled "fantastical," were modifications of the same Bible stories with all references to divine intervention removed and the supernatural events presented as magic. A third group of stories, labelled "realistic," modified the Bible stories further to exclude supernatural events and replace them with events that were "plausible due to human intervention." Keep reading