Actually, we are born dualists, as I’ve argued here:
https://discourse.biologos.org/t/doubt-faith-evolution-afterlife-history/57801/41?u=1cor15.54
It seems, then, that human beings are born with a natural sense of spirituality and with a mind that does instinctively think in spiritual terms.
For this reason, I would argue the exact opposite of the usual claim: we are born oriented toward God (capable of Him and drawn toward the spiritual realm) and it is through the influences of the world that we become atheists.
I remember a moment from my early childhood, my only memory from that time, literally. I must have been about two years old. I was sitting in a high chair, crying, because I had just encountered death for the first time after someone close to my family died. It was my first experience of loss, and I rejected it completely. I didn’t even know that death is inevitable for everyone, nor did I possess the kind of reflective mind I have now. And I hadn’t received any kind of religious notion yet. At that age, a child’s cognitive abilities are still very limited, arguably even less developed than those of an adult gorilla.
And yet, my reaction did not come from intellectual reasoning. It came from something deeper. My mind was not yet capable of fully processing such a reality, but I still experienced a profound refusal. That refusal came from the soul itself, from an instinctive awareness that death is an enemy, the last enemy, as Saint Paul calls it in his First Letter to the Corinthians.