1 August 2008

An article published in the Australian broadsheet The Age on 26 July 2008, headlined “ Infants 'have natural belief in God'” opened: “Infants are hard-wired to believe in God, and atheism has to be learned, according to an Oxford University psychologist.” And closes: "Atheism is definitely an acquired position,"

The article reported that “Dr Olivera Petrovich told a University of Western Sydney conference on the psychology of religion that even pre-school children constructed theological concepts as part of their understanding of the physical world”.

The Age bloggers have not all been supportive ......one in particuler asked: “How many atheist homes were surveyed and what were the results of these children's response to the existence of a deity?”

The University of Oxford Faculty of Theology page lists her research interests as: Psychological research of religion in human development across life span and in different cultures; nature of religious understanding and origin of religious concepts (especially of God); religious cognition and moral development; religious education.

On the curious 'Science & Spirit – exploring things that matter' website she is described as being from the “Experimental Psychology Department at Oxford University, where I research and tutor in developmental psychologist (sic). I also lecture in psychology of religion at Oxford — my course is open to theology, philosophy, and psychology students.” She was described as a “member of the Faculty of Theology at Wolfson College, Oxford University” on a web page describing her credentials in relation to the conference in Australia.

Read a lengthy approving article about Dr Olivera Petrovich from Sience & Spirit.

To the question in this website’s article “ Where do you see your interest in science and religion taking you in the future? she says:

What I ideally would like to do is obtain a proper, funded post in academic psychology of religion within a psychology department. That doesn’t exist at the moment, anywhere, but the interest is tremendous — every year for the past four or five years I’ve had inquiries from students wanting to do research in this area.

The other thing would be to get funding for one or two studentships to work on a large project with me so that people can get trained. At the moment, you have very good psychologists with no education in theology or religion, and theology people who have no technical knowledge of how to do psychological research. Why is that relevant? Because if people have no idea about a field, they can never reach a hypothesis that’s worth investigating.

The article ends with a plug: “Olivera Petrovich is the author of the upcoming book, The Child’s Theory of the World.”

The article states that her conclusions are largely based on two studies, one “of Japanese children aged four to six, and another of 400 British children aged five to seven from seven different faiths”:

Olivera Petrovich has receieved some research funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

The research grant funded a survey of British and Japanese children and adults to assess their teleological and cosmological inferences and reasoning in a cross-cultural comparison. Research is being prepared for publication as a book entitled The Child's Theory of the World.

More grants in the same vein are listed here.

She presented the research as Cosmological Reasoning in Preschool Children from Britain and Japan to the Institute of education in 2002.