It's funny how atheists believe in evolution in theory, but fervently religious groups like this are the ones winning at evolution in practice.
My theory is having kids is just really hard work, but a deeply ingrained religious belief that children are a blessing from God helps groups like the Amish push forward with it anyway.
sure, it does not matter that things that we pay for and consume ends up having a million things that makes us sick in multiple ways, and if you are in some developing nation, you would be hard pressed to find food to feed your babies that is not laced with some kind of harmful pesticides or fertilizer, but hey, we can always pay more in healthcare to extend our diseased misery. We are doing just fine, in the mean while, there are more and more existential threats as the day progress, but hey, say it with me, we are JUST.DOING.FINE.
Most countries (including those outside the west) are falling, or have fallen below replacement rate.
If we extrapolate this over the next few decades, and accept the conclusion that more technology = less children, and we can expect to see more technology in the future. Almost no new children will be born from within these high-tech societies, we will have to rely on immigration from Africa (the only place where replacement rate is high), and low-tech traditional religious societies.
People still have children and most countries do not need to be any more crowded than they are already. In fact many countries would benefit from having a lower population density.
Technology has already replaced most agricultural workers in most developed countries and I can't imagine anyone wanting to return to pre-industrial agriculture.
Enough food, clean water and knowledge of germ theory does most of the work there. New England has higher rates of natural increase for most of two centuries without benefit of modern medicine, as did Quebec.
Don't know if this is true of the Amish, but fundamentalist groups who target large families generally lose a large fraction of those kids to mainstream culture (source: Bob Altmeyer, The Authoritarians). Hence, their culture does not outcompete mainstream culture.
>Reasons for Population Growth. The primary forces driving the growth are sizable nuclear families (five or more children on average) and an average retention rate (Amish children who join the church as young adults) of 85 percent or more. A few outsiders have joined the Amish, but the growth is almost entirely from within the Amish community.
While they have Rumspringa as late teens and can theoretically choose not to get baptized and become adult members, choosing not to means exclusion from the only community they've ever known, into a world they have not been educated to make a living in - particularly, the girls.
At least some people do want to "win" against death by becoming immortal. Physics suggests true immortality is impossible, but maybe people will live a lot longer in future...
Biological immortality could be possible. Certain organisms are biologically immortal, and it's possible we can achieve that through technology. I think it's actually not at all unlikely we will get very close within a couple centuries, and that life expectancy will shoot through the roof. (We would have to fix some serious societal issues especially around pollution first though, beyond just the medical breakthroughs.)
If the human mind is a product of evolution, how can we be sure that it is reliable at arriving at the truth? What if false or irrational beliefs produced greater evolutionary fitness than true and rational ones? But, if that were so, it would undermine all our confidence in the very belief that the human mind is a product of evolution, making that a self-defeating idea.
Hence, if the human mind is a product of evolution, evolution must ultimately prefer truth to falsehood. But, what then to make of evidence that, in the long-run, natural selection prefers religious beliefs to non-religious belief? Can you see how that might be a problem for those who are convinced that all specifically religious beliefs are false and irrational?
Nah, if religious belief helps group cohesion in such a way that we get societies that overall increase the likelihood of survival, then the truth of said religion is irrelevant.
Religions themselves are to some degree affected by their own evolutionary pressures. The views on missionary work, procreation and possibly also military all will effect the group of people that adhere to the religion, and if they lead to a higher survival/birth-rate then the religion itself will also win against alternatives. The truth of its dogma isn’t really relevant for this factor (unless we start considering interventionist deities, but that’s a different discussion entirely, as the above would apply across shared value/belief systems without the need for interventionism)
> Nah, if religious belief helps group cohesion in such a way that we get societies that overall increase the likelihood of survival, then the truth of said religion is irrelevant.
Would you still endorse the same statement if one replaced “religious” with something else, say “philosophical”?
Also, is that saying “the truth of a belief is irrelevant, so long as it has pragmatic benefits”? But, doesn’t that undermine one of the key arguments for the truth of scientific claims - the pragmatic technological benefits of their acceptance?
The person you’re responding to is making a positive claim, not a normative one: from the anthropological perspective, religions solve coordination problems. That doesn’t mean we ought to solve coordination problems with religion, it just means that it has a moderately successful track record.
See above re: fundamental misunderstanding of truth in science.
Not quite sure where you’re going with the religion vs philosophy question, in the context of my statements the only real difference would be removing any threat of divine intervention, which itself may have some effect on the how well groups align with their shared beliefs. Read like that then yes, I would agree that the statement would apply for philosophy, but weaker.
As for your original post, you
make a jump to stating that evolution would prefer truth, but that’s not a given simply from the fact that we perceive our world in such a way that we consider evolution. Evolution as we understand it is without intent, and only “prefers” that which in the
long run yields further offspring.
A point I was trying to make was that the truthfulness of for instance religiosity doesn’t impact whether or not it has an effect on “fitness”. A religion can be entirely false, and yet contain memes that make its adherents’ genes procreate more successfully.
You can’t be sure you’re arrived at the truth. Nothing about the philosophy of science expects you to be sure; it’s an inductive process that encourages increasing confidence, but never absolute certainty.
Evolution doesn’t “prefer” anything. It’s a stochastic adaptation process. The existence of religious beliefs is incredibly interesting from an anthropological perspective, but doesn’t really tell us anything about evolution itself.
It isn’t an argument that we should believe in any particular religion. So, even if it works, yes it works just as well for Norse paganism as for anything else.
But still, an argument that “some religion is probably true” would have value even if it can’t tell us which religion is true
Having kids is probably no more work for them that it is you, and probably less. They’re willing to put kids to work doing substantial jobs from an early age.
Kids are actually pretty easy if you don't have a ton of distractions. Most complaints about how kids are difficult are about how they keep you from the things you want to do.
One of my grandmothers was one of 10 kids, and liked to relate that her parents always said it was the first 4 kids who were the hardest. After that, they start to look after themselves! Older kids act as babysitters for younger kids, etc.
If your goal is simply to increase population as the end goal, then sure I guess the Amish are winning. I know it's generally accepted that population growth is always desirable, but I am not at all convinced of it. I would love to see a significant reversal of the trend and see population decline — especially in deeply religious families. (It's my opinion that religion is a net negative for the world these days, some more than others.)
Beyond the lack of belief in deities part, atheism is not really a coherent philosophy or a label which reliably defines a group of people. As such it doesn’t make sense to put forward an atheism versus X argument. Atheism is the rejection of various belief systems, not an alternative to them. It simply has none of the advantages or disadvantages of such belief systems. It does not even imply that the atheist has actually contended with any metaphysical questions.
My theory is having kids is just really hard work, but a deeply ingrained religious belief that children are a blessing from God helps groups like the Amish push forward with it anyway.