As Melbourne welcomes atheists from around the world to the 2010 Global Atheist Convention at the Melbourne Convention Centre, more and more conversations are turning to atheism. What? Why? Who? How? Where? When?

So, what is atheism? The Greek root of the word is atheos, without god.  Wikipedia’s answer to the question is simply: the absence of belief that any deities exist.

If atheists have an absence of belief then one of the most obvious answers to the who question is: babies.

It’s a fact that all babies are atheists. Without exception. There is no evidence of any baby who was ever born a true believer. Babies are born with an absence of belief.

Babies are born with an absence of belief in anything at all, really. Newborns have no concept of the universe, of “I am”, of “Spiderman”, of “Santa Claus”, of “a creator” nor of  “a Father in Heaven”.

To understand these sophisticated concepts enough to be able to invest them with belief requires sophisticated thinking that is equal to the task. Conscious belief requires significant thinking skill. And, no-one is ever born a skilled thinker.

Why?

There are two obvious reasons why all babies are born without thinking skill and also with the absence of belief in deities. The first reason is neurons and the second is hours.

Babies do have plenty of neurons. More than adults. The brain is the only organ of the body that starts off big and gets smaller as unused neurons die off. Babies may have a 100 times more neurons than you do. However, a baby’s brain lacks connectivity. It lacks neural pathways. These have to be built up over a lot of time and a lot of repetition.

As the days and weeks and months progress the newborn baby is exposed to a whole new world and an exciting new environment. Parents, siblings, family and pets and neighbours. Family culture, music, discussions, foods, smells and noises. Local street culture and eventually the culture of their family’s country, race and creed.

Gradually these patterns of cultural stimulation become strong enough to build connections between neurons and, in time, these can become neuronal pathways that are used. Cognition. Thinking becomes stored in these pathways and can then be reused. Re-cognition. Faces can be recognised. Noises become familiar. Later, much later, 1 and 1 can be recognised as being 2.

This all takes time. A lot of time. Hours and hours of practise, repetition and rehearsal. Most religions are well aware of how much time it takes to form a true believer and prayers and religious rituals are practised over and over again. Sometimes thousands of times. Holy books. Rosaries. Prayer wheels. Prostrations and Baptisms. The Jesuit maxim is, “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will give you the man”.

That’s the second reason why all babies are atheists. Because babies have never had the time to put in those hours and hours of practise, repetition and rehearsal.

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