On 02 Apr 2017, at 21:43, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 4/1/2017 11:55 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Am 01.04.2017 um 23:50 schrieb Brent Meeker:
On 4/1/2017 12:39 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
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.
It's also true that atheists have a higher proportion of their
children survive to adulthood. These are simply correlates: in
technological, educated societies people have fewer children and
have
fewer of them die young - and they are less superstitious.
It might be good to check if this statement complies with empirical
findings.
Just compare statistics for a nation with lots of non-believers, e.g
France or Sweden, to those with a high proportion of believers, e.g.
Afghanistan or Ethiopia. Which is not to say it's a cause/effect
relationship. Where life is hard and medical services are sparse
people cling to religion and their children often die - so they have
more children to compensate...and having more children contributes
to their poverty. All the major religions encourage fertility.
Religion as a political force aims to win by demographics.
I would like to see the details, and the formulary used. In some group
people classify me, or agnostic like me, as atheists, because we
don't believe in God, nor assume it, and in other groups we are
classified as believer, because we don't believe in the non-existence
of god. If the formulary exploits the confusion between ~[], and []~,
they are of no value. If you have a link on some formulary used, I
would be interested. I have qualified myself as atheists for years.
The problem I got was only with what you have called "strong atheists".
Both in machine theology and in neoplatonism, God does not exist, in
the sense that it is not a being, but it meta-exists and is
responsible for the existence or appearance of all beings. Again, that
might sound a bit mysterious, but the same appears in logic: the
arithmetical truth is responsible for the dreams and the development
of beliefs (true and false).
Bruno
Brent
Dominic Johnson tries to explain this empirical fact in
evolutionary terms.
I looked up Johnson's papers. Thanks for pointing him out. Some
the theories in "The Elephant in the Room" apply equally to current
politics, e.g. in section 3e:
Indeed, Johnson has a paper
Dominic D. P. Johnson, Bradley A. Thayer, The evolution of
offensive realism: Survival under anarchy from the Pleistocene to
the present, Politics and the Life Sciences, v. 35, N 1, p. 1 — 26,
2016.
that is pretty similar.
Evgenii
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