Maybe we can think along the lines of why the "gay gene" persists. Gay people make attentive uncles, improving the fitness of their near relatives, or so the "just-so" story goes.
Maybe atheists are freer thinkers, able to think outside the box to come up with solutions to important social problems. But presumably society doesn't want too many free-thinkers, limiting the number of atheists in society. Something like that. Though how to explain that atheism in practice is probably the dominant "religion" in Australia. And even more so amongst young people, it appears. My son, who went to a nominally christian school, said he only knew of two overtly christian boys amongst the 180-odd in his cohort. Food for thought. On Sat, Apr 01, 2017 at 09:39:37AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > Am 31.03.2017 um 21:40 schrieb Brent Meeker: > > > > > >On 3/31/2017 6:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> > ... > > >> > >>The problem is that the strong atheists called themselves just > >>atheists, and then claim they have no belief, when in fact they > >>believe in 0 god, unlike agnostic who say: I don't know, give the > >>definition and the theory. > > > >There are also strong agnostics, i.e. those who hold it is impossible > >to know anything about god(s). > > > >Brent > > > > I would like to note that in the paper that I have referenced > discusses a completely different question. Provided that one could > explain religion in the framework of evolutionary advantages, the > question arises whether one should also try to explain atheism in > the same framework. > > In the paper there are references to empirical studies that show > that atheists have lower birthrates. Dominic Johnson tries to > explain this empirical fact in evolutionary terms. > > Evgenii > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
