If it is indeed most appropriate to tackle the issue of origin of religion by examining
individual development, the question arises when humans begin to acquire
religious beliefs. To answer this question adequately, our earlier distinction between
beliefs as doctrines, on the one hand, and beliefs as mental states of ordinary people,
on the other, is of crucial importance. Doctrinal beliefs are transmitted through culture
and thus need not be representative of people’s everyday (often spontaneous)
religious understanding. Spontaneous (i.e., “untutored”) beliefs are of special interest
in psychology because they can be triggered by some maturational (i.e., natural
or innate) mechanisms which determine how and when we acquire such beliefs (Petrovich,
2000). The distinction between innate and acquired concepts is an old question
that modern psychology has inherited from philosophy and which continues to
be in the centre of modern developmental research (e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Karmiloff-
Smith, 1991). Innately prepared concepts not only occur spontaneously in
human development but are also basic or simple, unlike concepts that are transmitted
through instruction. Interestingly, the relevance of innateness to religion was
noticed by Otto (1923/1979), who argued that the first and central task of studying
religious behaviour was to establish the development of rudimentary religious concepts,
in particular that of the numinous (i.e., the holy), which task he rightly saw to
belong in psychology