ABSTRACT
In this chapter the focus is on how religious beliefs, and also other aspects of religious systems, are acquired by individuals. Gods have properties that seem to contradict experience in the everyday
world: gods can be in more than one place at a time, perform miracles, and so on. This poses special problems for understanding the acquisition of religious beliefs. Recent studies of early learning have shown that children ‘know more than they can have learnt’, in the sense that early learning is guided by pre-existing constraints and predispositions with some specificity to particular domains of knowledge. Many aspects of the concepts of deities are readily assimilated because some of the properties of a deity fit with what the individual already ‘knows’ about the nature of agents acting with intention. However, other aspects of gods are acquired through experience during socialisation, and this involves accepting norms, values and counterfactual beliefs on the example and authority of others. In this, the acquisition of religious beliefs differs only in degree from other aspects of socialisation.
