Five Hundred Children, No Books

If a funeral, a shared song or a coming-of-age ceremony is enough to count, the island prediction becomes easy. Those practices need no supernatural belief. I mean something more specific: shared beliefs about gods, spirits or other sacred realities, expressed in practices that a community passes on.

That working definition still has awkward edges. A community may treat its ancestors as present in daily life without dividing the world into a religious part and a secular one. A humanist funeral can mark a death without making any claim about a surviving soul. Resemblance is a reason to compare them, not to give them the same name.

One cross-cultural study coded seven religious traits in thirty-three hunter-gatherer societies, using ethnographic accounts. All were coded as having animism, belief that natural beings or phenomena have intentions or a vital force. Other traits, including afterlife beliefs, ritual specialists and creator gods, varied. The authors then used genetic and linguistic relationships to model earlier states of these traditions. forager study

That is evidence of a widespread pattern in a defined sample. It does not show how unexposed children would begin, and present-day hunter-gatherers are not living copies of the distant past. Even here, the proposed universal bundle comes apart.

Children can find a purpose where an adult sees a physical cause. In Deborah Kelemen's 1999 study, forty-eight elementary-school children and sixteen undergraduates chose explanations for properties of unfamiliar animals and natural objects. Younger children more often accepted purpose-based accounts of nonliving things, such as pointy rocks existing so animals would not sit on them. This is teleology, explaining something by what it is for. pointy rocks

Those children were already growing up in a culture. The task compared explanations supplied by a researcher; it did not observe children inventing a creator god. A separate experiment with eighty physical scientists found more acceptance of inaccurate purpose-based explanations under time pressure. That measures a reasoning tendency, not a hidden religious commitment. scientists

Afterlife reasoning is more complicated than the idea that young children believe and schooling gradually removes it. Bering and Bjorklund's 2004 abstract reports that children could distinguish biological death from continued mental activity, with different patterns across ages and types of question. Older children and adults still attributed some knowledge, emotions and desires to the dead. That is the result available in the abstract; I could not inspect the full paper's methods. afterlife study

A later study interviewed children, adolescents and adults in Texas and Vanuatu after a death story framed in either medical or religious terms. It found cultural and framing differences, including continued bodily functions in some Vanuatu responses. The questions people have heard, and the way an interviewer asks, can affect their answers. cultural comparison

Children also copy unnecessary actions. In one experiment, sixty-three children aged three to five watched an adult open unfamiliar objects after training to spot pointless steps. Many still copied those steps. This overimitation can help explain how a precise procedure gets passed on. The experiment used objects and demonstrations, not worship, and it does not establish that faithful copying has only one cause. overimitation

These findings give religion some plausible raw material: purpose-seeking, thoughts about minds after death, and careful social learning. They leave the decisive step untested. A tendency that makes a belief easy to learn is not the same as a tendency that generates a whole religion without teaching.

The Americas make the island question tempting. The monuments are there to compare: a pyramid in Mexico, a temple in Greece. People separated by an ocean built places for communal worship.

Left: Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan by Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Right: the Parthenon, Athens, public domain. Both via Wikimedia Commons.

But the people who settled the Americas arrived with cultures. Their descendants inherited, changed and exchanged traditions. Shared human ancestry includes cultural ancestry; it is not just a shared kind of brain. Calling the Americas a second blank-slate experiment erases the very inheritance we need to understand.

Nor was 1492 the first contact across the Atlantic. Researchers dated wood worked with metal tools at the Norse site of L'Anse aux Meadows to 1021, using a known radiocarbon event and tree rings. Genetic research also supports pre-European contact between Polynesian and Native American populations. Neither result tells us how a particular religious practice originated. Norse evidence Pacific evidence

The comparison cannot supply two independent groups starting with no religious history and reaching the same result.

The Tongan castaways had Christian schooling. Their survival cannot tell us what children raised without religion would believe. reported recollections

John Frum on Tanna developed among people already living with local traditions, missionaries and colonial rule. Jean Guiart's field study cites reports of the movement from 1941, before wartime American military bases reshaped the region. A new movement grew out of a complicated history. Tanna field study

John Frum ceremonial cross, Tanna by Tim Ross, 1967, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nicaraguan Sign Language shows something else. A 2004 study compared thirty deaf signers from successive school cohorts with ten hearing Spanish speakers. Later cohorts more often separated a movement's manner and path into successive signs. Children helped develop the structure of an emerging language within a communicating community. sign-language study

The castaways retained a faith, Tanna transformed traditions, and deaf Nicaraguans developed a language. Putting them in a row does not turn them into three replications of the island.

The Gathas, hymns central to Zoroastrian worship, ask people to choose between truth and falsehood. Yasna 30 links that choice to thought, words and actions. It gives moral choice a prominent place. But the hymns also contain prayers for divine help: Yasna 28 opens with a petition to Mazda. Reducing this tradition to a refusal to surrender would miss those prayers. Yasna 30 and 28

Faravahar relief, Persepolis by Napishtim, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A confession, a prayer and a moral demand can mean different things in different traditions. Their visible similarities do not settle whether the self is corrupt, whether there is a creator, or what salvation would mean.

Convergent evolution offers an analogy for similar forms arising along different histories. Vertebrate and cephalopod camera eyes both focus light onto a retina, although those retinas are arranged differently. An octopus's photoreceptors face the incoming light; ours face the other way. octopus eye review

Vertebrate (left) and octopus (right) eye by Caerbannog, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Religion adds a problem the eye diagram cannot solve: people teach, travel, translate and borrow. To distinguish independent invention from inheritance, we need evidence about those routes. Similarity alone will not do it.

Nor can we count broad labels such as Indian, Chinese and Native American as independent witnesses with no shared roots. Each label covers many histories and communities. Related scriptures also carry earlier teachings forward. A count of matching ideas has to account for that transmission before it can tell us anything about convergence.

A claim that every society has the same religious skeleton needs a stable definition. If we keep expanding the skeleton whenever a counterexample appears, we make it impossible to test. A secular ceremony must be allowed to count as secular.

The Soviet state restricted religious institutions and promoted atheism. After its collapse, Orthodox identification in Russian surveys rose from 31 percent in 1991 to 72 percent in 2008. Monthly attendance was still only 7 percent in 2008. Identification, belief and practice are different measures; a rise in one does not mean all three returned together. survey and methods

The queue at Lenin's Mausoleum, Moscow, 1969. Fortepan / Pohl Pálma, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same automatic-return story fails in former East Germany. In the 2008 International Social Survey Programme, about 52 percent of respondents there said they did not believe in God. That was the highest proportion among the thirty countries and territories compared in Tom Smith's report. It was a dated comparison of belief in God, not a measurement of every form of spirituality. ISSP report

The Jugendweihe, a secular coming-of-age ceremony, continued after German reunification. Its history reaches back before the East German state, which later tied it to a socialist pledge. A present-day organizer describes participation as voluntary and open across worldviews. organizer's history

That survival tells us a ceremony can remain useful after the political setting changes. It does not demonstrate that religion secretly returned. People can want a public way to mark adulthood while continuing to disbelieve in God.

The Temple at Burning Man began with a death. In 2000, David Best and Jack Haye brought the Temple of the Mind to the event. When fellow builder Michael Hefflin died in a motorcycle accident, it became a memorial to him. Other participants began leaving remembrances of their own dead. Temple history

Messages at the Burning Man Temple by Victor Grigas, 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Burning Man Project describes the Temple as a space for people of any religion or none. Participants leave photographs, inscriptions and mementos; the Temple is then burned in silence. This is an intentionally maintained memorial practice, with its own history.

It matters to the island question because it shows that a shared creed is not required for a shared response to grief. It also makes the definition problem unavoidable. A rite for the dead can carry religious meaning for one participant and no supernatural claim for another.

AA's practices make the inheritance visible. In a later account of the program before the Twelve Steps, Bill Wilson recalled admitting defeat, taking a moral inventory, confessing shortcomings, making restitution, helping others and praying for help. This was his retrospective summary, not a fixed six-step text used from the first meeting. Wilson's account

Saying grace before the barbecue dinner, Pie Town, New Mexico. Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration, 1940, Library of Congress, public domain.

The published Twelve Steps retain God, prayer and a spiritual awakening, alongside inventory and amends. They qualify God with the words "as we understood Him." That leaves room for differing understandings; it does not make the text free of theology. the Twelve Steps

A program's survival cannot prove that only its effective elements survived. That would require comparing the effects of those elements, not reading their history backward from success. AA shows an inherited religious practice adapted for recovery. It gives us no controlled test of which parts of religion humans need.

Religious texts have their own accounts of what people bring into the world. Romans 2:14 and 2:15 describes people without the law doing what it requires, with its work written on their hearts. Quran 30:30 speaks of the natural disposition in which God created people. These are claims inside traditions, not results from developmental psychology. Romans Quran

A believer may understand human capacities as part of creation. A nonbeliever may understand them through natural history. Finding a psychological route to a belief does not, by itself, decide whether the belief is true. I do not think the island can settle whether God is real.

My expectation is that the descendants would develop repeated ceremonies, ways to mourn, and perhaps beliefs about spirits or continued life after death. I would not put a probability on the last part. The research does not supply one.

Dusk over an island in the Mekong, Don Det, Laos by Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two hundred years gives the imaginary community time to change. It gives us no evidence of what the descendants would actually say when asked about their dead.

The sources support different kinds of statements: laboratory findings, historical accounts, models and religious teachings. None observes the island community imagined here. The prediction is my judgment; it is not a measured probability.