“The innocent child believes all sorts of things that aren’t true— like in Santa or the tooth fairy or monsters.”
Not only that, but does a child develop a belief in Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, or God, without someone putting those ideas in their head. They do seem to dream up monsters in the closet or under the bed without any prompting, however. Hmmm, does that mean monsters in the closet and under the bed are real?
It's really neat how that evolution has hardwired our brain to deal with threats and to know about threats (intuition and such). My two year old doesn't need to know any context about the image he is looking at to decide that it's scary to him-- just things that are literally harmless in isolation like creepy, dark lighting. You could put a picture of Jesus Christ in that setting and he'd draw the same conclusion: that the person in that picture could do him harm. It's like goosebumps, which were useful when we had hair all over our bodies as a defense mechanism (making ourselves look larger than we really are to our foe).
I think that because children have a limited understanding of science-- practically everything they see adults do looks like a magic trick-- that children would readily believe that the only explanation for the world and the stars and the sun and moon is some magician like their parents.