Assume Darwin’s Mechanism for Humanity

Thought experiment. Let’s accept the assumption that humanity’s capacity for knowledge and thought is the product not of a truth knowing bias but of a survival bias. (This is at the heart of Alvin Plantinga’s critique of a non-theistic Darwinian mechanism producing humanity. or here).

This means that homo-sapien the worrier or warrior who fears the lion behind the bush survives by the fight or flight mechanism whether or not there is a lion behind the bush.

Given, however, the near universal religious impulse of humanity we must also assume that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that favored survival. Religious, god-fearing (literally) smart apes out-performed and out-survived proto-atheistic smart apes and therefore passed on their bias for believing (regardless of truth of existence of God, or the lion behind the bush) genes and epigenetics to their progeny.

“oh but now we’ve grown past that”

My atheist friends assert that “now we’ve grown past that stuff” and “we no longer need that stuff to survive”.

So belief in God this one of those faux truth claims like “the lion is behind the bush”. Is this another level of evolutionary development, that atheists will out-produce, have more babies, and out compete, have more power with which to succeed at the expense of the theistic believing smart apes they share the planet with?

Whether of not there is a god (the lion behind the bush that may or may not be there) is of course irrelevant to any of this.

Three Outcomes

So now the supposedly further evolved atheists that no longer fear the imagined lion behind the bush assert their evolutionary superiority. Even though they must admit that:

1. They are flowing against millions of years of evolution on the basis of an assertion similar to whether or not there is a lion behind the bush

2. My guess is that atheists in general produce fewer children than theists (I think this wouldn’t be hard to demonstrate given that we know some theistic groups like Roman Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, the religious poor in the developing world are humanity’s most profligate reproducers) and will rely on a-religious conversion. They of course find religious conversion highly offensive. This is competition as Darwin predicts.

3. The other strategy to winning and replacing theistic smart-apes is to make them extinct like Neanderthals which will I’m sure involve all of the normal human practices found helpful in genocide and intolerance which humanity has always used to overcome their adversaries.