Is Intelligent Design a cross-cultural universal ?
As I am now co-writing a paper on the cognitive basis of intelligent design, I was wondering if any of you could help me with the following question: according to Deb Kelemen, Margaret Evans, and others the design argument in theology is natural. Young children infer teleology (goal-directedness) not just in artifacts and body-parts but also in things that are not teleological, such as rain (to water plants) or lions (to go in zoos). And it turns out that Alzheimer patients show a re-emerging preference for teleological over mechanistic explanations (see Lombrozo et al. 2007).
But it is not clear from all this whether intuitive teleology equates with intuitive theism. So I was wondering whether religions other than christianity, judaism and islam have something analogous to the design argument as formulated by Paley and many others.
Are there any experiment in non-western settings that replicate Kelemen's experimental findings (namely that children intuitively appeal to god as a creator). Although most religions have creation myths, I am interested in whether children from nonwestern cultures are intuitive theists from an early age on.