Dear Berational,
Is it me!! The article is just about child development, it is not about God or religion.
On the contrary the point is that this guy seems to use standard child development studies to support a conclusion that there is a developmental default belief in god. And it is an enormous and completed unevidenced leap. There is nothing in studies that, for example, demonstrate that children at an early stage begin to recognise that an object placed behind a curtain hasn't disappeared but is, well, behind the curtain, remotely to support his conclusions.
In fact virtually all of the developmental experiments can be explained by combinations of the following:
1. The hugely complex cognitive development of the human brain requires learning and therefore human babies are born with little physical or mental abilities (compared to many other species) but learn massively in early weeks, months and years.
2. The first point makes the human baby extremely vulnerable so it is important evolutionarily that both parent and baby have a protection instinct that keeps baby close to adults.
3. Humans are social animals and therefore require interactions and comfort from other humans, both for protection and for development.
4. Humans, largely due to their exceptional cognitive capacity are both inherently inquisitive (which is important for survival) and emotionally advances (which supports their social behaviour, which is also important for survival and development).
All explained through classic survival and evolutionary needs - no magic sky fairy required although I have no doubt that the inquisitiveness coupled with a lack of rational understanding of the world around us may lead to the god of the gaps syndrome. But that's a massive jump away from a suggested default belief in god, which runs completely counter to the known evidence that without being brought up religious children are very unlikely simply to choose to be religious (even in a culture where evidence of religion is all around them).
