Tom’s Big Picture

“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

The atheist macroevolutionist Richard Dawkins* recently posted a link on his blog to an article on the “quiver full” movement among conservative Protestants. Most interesting to me is the response of his audience in the comments.

A heckler posts:

Oh, the irony: as you atheists/evolutionists realize that you’ll be victims of your own, very real, self inflicted form of natural selection (abortion, birth control).

An atheist responds:

Not if we can conquer aging and death through scientific means.

Delicious irony: it seems that belief in the worldview dictated by macroevolution is itself evolutionarily disadvantageous, as only deeply religious people (and really stupid people) reproduce themselves at an above-replacement pace.

By their own logic, religious belief in an imperative for high fertility is evolutionary advantageous. The logic of the eventual evolutionary triumph of faith is inarguable: all they can do is appeal to their faith that science will save them from death and the necessity of rearing children. In other words, they have replaced one faith with another that is empty and sterile.

Raising children is hard, arguably a form of voluntary slavery. Only faith in God can provide sufficient motivation to raise a large family. The future belongs to the fundamentalists.

Nietzsche may have been right when he remarked that “God is dead” as a real belief among the elites of late 19th century Europe; but as atheism and agnosticism run their course, God is coming back with a vengeance.

*Dawkins is a British scientist and a public personality who has a sort of anti-religious missionary zeal against all types of religion (and to his credit, he does not pull any politically correct punches when it comes to Islam), seeing them as the world’s prime source of conflict; we will be seeing more of him as a public enemy of the faith. Dawkins’ scientific ideas, however, when confined to their proper microevolutionary contexts (as opposed to the man’s macroevolutionary faith), are quite interesting. In particular, his work on memes (ideas that replicate themselves analogous to genes), stripped of his political agenda, is brilliant.