People seem to believe what their parents believe. Sometimes cool friends, when you are 12, or college buddies, when you are 20, can draw people in other directions, but the influence of one's group seems to be a major determinant. How many believers, yourself excepted, have thought for themselves in this matter?
I think there are good reasons why this is so: A human baby doesn't know whether it is born in a cave 50,000 years B.C., or in a mud hut, or a castle, or in the land of internet gadgetry, or in a 31st-century pod orbiting Alpha Centauri. So natural selection has built them to learn from their environment and learn quickly. The fastest way for babies to figure out how its world works is to do what the people around them do. It is so adaptive a rule that it becomes our default. It might even explain how religions got started,: When posed with a mystery, we turn to our parents, then to wizened elders, and then to the great father in the sky. So I think we can ultimately lay the blame, or credit, on the principle of reinforcement and its associated process of generalization.
going from 96% to 92% to 87% is a pretty big decline!
Framing it as "the number of athiests doubled from 1944 to 1990, then doubled again from 1990 to 2011, then doubled again from 2011 to 2018" makes it seem like atheism is trending up from a very low baseline.
I don't know if it vindicates the God of the Gaps, but I don't agree that athiesm is flat either. Preference falsification could also be hiding a lot of athiesm, like the Gervais and Najle article found, so it could be the curve is even steeper upwards!
I'm an atheist, but not the militant sort, I just grew up in a godless family and have never taken any of that stuff seriously.
If the Origin of Species was retracted, and it no longer became possible to explain the complex design evident in Nature as the outcome of an unconscious process, you bet I'd start looking around for the designer!
I'd probably start off looking at polytheistic-type explanations; the God of Antelopes and the God of Lions definitely seem to be working at cross purposes, but it would suddenly become a very important and relevant question.
You might want to try your statistics on the native population of Europe. We're sucking in a lot of believing immigrants, but I think that's covering up a complete collapse of Christianity all over the continent.
If I meet a white man who believes in God, I remember. It's kind of weird and brave and laudably contrarian.
People seem to believe what their parents believe. Sometimes cool friends, when you are 12, or college buddies, when you are 20, can draw people in other directions, but the influence of one's group seems to be a major determinant. How many believers, yourself excepted, have thought for themselves in this matter?
I think there are good reasons why this is so: A human baby doesn't know whether it is born in a cave 50,000 years B.C., or in a mud hut, or a castle, or in the land of internet gadgetry, or in a 31st-century pod orbiting Alpha Centauri. So natural selection has built them to learn from their environment and learn quickly. The fastest way for babies to figure out how its world works is to do what the people around them do. It is so adaptive a rule that it becomes our default. It might even explain how religions got started,: When posed with a mystery, we turn to our parents, then to wizened elders, and then to the great father in the sky. So I think we can ultimately lay the blame, or credit, on the principle of reinforcement and its associated process of generalization.
> That's a decline, but an awfully small one
going from 96% to 92% to 87% is a pretty big decline!
Framing it as "the number of athiests doubled from 1944 to 1990, then doubled again from 1990 to 2011, then doubled again from 2011 to 2018" makes it seem like atheism is trending up from a very low baseline.
I don't know if it vindicates the God of the Gaps, but I don't agree that athiesm is flat either. Preference falsification could also be hiding a lot of athiesm, like the Gervais and Najle article found, so it could be the curve is even steeper upwards!
yes.....Big
I'm an atheist, but not the militant sort, I just grew up in a godless family and have never taken any of that stuff seriously.
If the Origin of Species was retracted, and it no longer became possible to explain the complex design evident in Nature as the outcome of an unconscious process, you bet I'd start looking around for the designer!
I'd probably start off looking at polytheistic-type explanations; the God of Antelopes and the God of Lions definitely seem to be working at cross purposes, but it would suddenly become a very important and relevant question.
You might want to try your statistics on the native population of Europe. We're sucking in a lot of believing immigrants, but I think that's covering up a complete collapse of Christianity all over the continent.
If I meet a white man who believes in God, I remember. It's kind of weird and brave and laudably contrarian.
Getting any statistics from America is a waste of time because of it's constantly changing demographics. America is a place not a nation