Why religion? "If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done. It's a false belief, but it's good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything," he says. "The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us."

Comments

[Dave Ph]

But isn't there an age (maybe maturity) cut-off, before which you cannot distiguish what you know from what another person knows?

Seems like a similar thing to me...

[Tom Hume]

Err... isn't that what the quote I've posted above is saying? That children think everyone knows what they know...

[John]

So its saying that people who have religion haven't grown up?

[joh]

Hmm, interestingly one of the main symptoms of autism is that children with autism do not develop that sense of other people as distinct from themselves (i.e. the famous Sally-Ann test)...

It would be entertaining to see someone try to argue that people with a strong religious mentality have something equatable to autism. :-)