@Felix Wilde
Firstly: Is Furches' post fundamentalist? No.
Although the assertion that people are natural theists is misguided and faulty, that doesn't make it fundamentalist; he even admits that atheists may have morality and even reality without god (thank you for that kind consideration on your part, mr. Furches).
Part of the problem hinges on what he means by 'natural theists'. If he means 'people are innately theistic' then he is wrong, if he's using the 'natural' in its dull everyday sense of, say, 'people are naturally drawn to theism = a lot of people throughout history have gone in for theism, and atheists are the odd ones out', then this sounds plausible, even if not verifiable.
I like your questioning of the commonsensical idea that throughout time most people have been religious in one sense or another, and, as you write, we can neither confirm nor reject this commonsensical idea. I have similar thoughts, but there's one thing I can't make fit: it seems to me that the human brain is a meaning making machine that wants stuff to add up (cognitive consonance), and if you look at the work of anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss or Evans-Pritchard, you'll find that the 'primitive' societies they visited were brimming with metaphysical ideas.
For example (from Evans-pritchard): the shed collapsed and killed a boy in Azande territory, Sudan. Now, the Azande are not naive, they know it was the termites eating away at the wood that caused the collapse. But why did it collapse at the very moment, the boy was underneath it playing? why not half-an-hour earlier or later? The Azande solution - adding meaning to what seems senseless by way of the supernatural - is sorcery.
Someone wanted to kill the boy to punish his parents for some misdoing of theirs and used magic powers to curse him. Things suddenly add up, let's go find out who the witch is, and so on and so on.
[continues...]
