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Fitrah Argument

Form

The Islamic argument from the fitrah, the innate disposition, as presented by Hamza Tzortzis (The Divine Reality, 2016) and widely in dawah:

  1. Qur'an 30:30 and the hadith "every child is born on the fitrah; it is his parents who make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian" (Bukhari 1358–1359) teach that humans are born with a natural disposition to recognise and submit to one God.
  2. Modern cognitive science confirms it: children are "intuitive theists" who attribute purpose and agency to the world, and belief in gods is universal.
  3. Atheism and polytheism are therefore corruptions of the natural state by upbringing and society.
  4. Therefore monotheism is the default of the human mind, which testifies to Allah, and Islam, as the religion of the fitrah, is true.

It is the Islamic counterpart of the sensus divinitatis.

My Positions

  1. The science says the opposite of what the argument needs. Children are intuitive animists and promiscuous teleologists: they attribute agency to the wind, purpose to rocks, and minds to teddy bears, and they believe in Santa, monsters, and the tooth fairy with equal conviction (Hyperactive Agency Detection). The natural output of the child's mind is many invisible agents, which is animism and polytheism, the very things the hadith calls corruption. Nothing in the child's cognition selects one god, the Qur'an, or Muhammad. Justin Barrett and Deborah Kelemen, whose work is cited, both reject the inference, and the citation is selective (Cherry-picking).
  2. Natural is not true. We are also born disposed to see faces in clouds (Pareidolia), to fear snakes, to favour our kin, and to believe our group is the best. A disposition is a fact about brains, and the question of whether its outputs are true is exactly the question it cannot answer (Appeal to Nature).
  3. The hadith makes a prediction that has never come true. If children are born Muslim and only made Jewish or Christian by their parents, then a child raised with no religious instruction should grow into a Muslim. Children raised without religion overwhelmingly become non-religious, and no child isolated from Islam has ever spontaneously produced the shahada, the five prayers, or the direction of Mecca. A disposition that must be supplied by a book and a parent before it appears is called education (Religious Upbringing of Children).
  4. The hadith exempts its own religion. Parents make a child a Jew or a Christian, but a Muslim child is also made a Muslim by its parents, and the hadith's logic would have to count that as corruption too. That it does not is Special Pleading.
  5. It functions to deny that ex-Muslims exist. As Romans 1 does for Christians, the doctrine implies that every unbeliever secretly knows and suppresses, which is a claim about strangers' minds that cannot be checked and that the people in question deny (No True Scotsman, Divine Hiddenness). The millions who have left Islam, many at real risk, are the argument's counter-example, and the argument's response is to call them liars.
  6. Even if a disposition toward one god existed, it would not pick Islam. Jews and Christians are monotheists too. The step from "innate monotheism" to "the Qur'an is the word of God" is a step the argument never takes, because there is no road.

Sources

  • Qur'an 30:30; Sahih al-Bukhari 1358–1359
  • Tzortzis, H., The Divine Reality: God, Islam and the Mirage of Atheism (2016)
  • Barrett, J., Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief (2012)
  • Kelemen, D., "Are Children 'Intuitive Theists'?", Psychological Science 15 (2004)
  • Bloom, P., "Religion is natural", Developmental Science 10 (2007)
  • Hood, B., Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable (2009)

Also see