SkyDancer_0202

I don't know about your 'thinking better' = 'survival advantage' idea - particularly as being an atheist usually means the opposite in terms of survival advantage in a world over-run with religion.

I do think that most people are 'religious' by default. They've never particularly thought about it; its just the way they were raised, what most in their community are, what so much of the societal feedback supports.

There has also been recent research indicating that humans are predisposed towards the 'religious experience'; some of the research even seeming supporting the old saying 'opiate of the masses'

EssEff

Not necessarily, but that's part of it. IMHO humans have an instinctive fear of death -- as do all animals -- and thinking that you can cheat death by doing whatever it is you need to do for eternal life. "He who believes in me shall have eternal life" is one of the most basic tenets of Christianity -- perhaps the most basic.

There's great comfort in having a loving parental figure who will pick us up when we fall dead -- a transferrence from the parent who picks us up when we fall as children.

There's also a great comfort in believing that there's meaning in seemingly meaningless events. The thinkers of the great religions figured out answers and came up with meaning for these things centuries, even millenia, ago. Their believers don't have to do that thinking now, but many of them do go back over that ground. But they do deductive reasoning -- i.e., given that there is a God, what is God's opinion about x-y-z?

Atheists have that same need for comfort and for a way to deal with our mortality as anyone else, but without a catechism to follow or Sunday sermons to tell us what to think about it, we have to think for ourselves. We have two choices: find another premise for deductive reasoning, or look for evidence in the world and do some inductive reasoning.

Atheism is hard. That's why it's rare. For most of us, requires the courage to depart from the teachings of our parents and other authority figures and a willingness to seek out our own answers to the problems of life and morality and to sift the questions that are true universals and those that are artificially created by religion. Some atheists probably have sought out a system that doesn't include belief in a god, but that's not a requirement. In fact, requirements are an assumption based on analogy with religion.

I think it's natural for people who have accepted the belief system of their religion to assume that atheists have also accepted a system. It's that deductive reasoning again. They subconsciously assume that people need to have the answers given to them by an authority figure because that's all they've known. Several Christians have asked me "If you don't believe in God, then where does your soul go after you die?" So many of their premises are tied up in their worldview that they don't even realize how many assumptions they make. I try to be patient with them. Sometimes it's hard though!

Heathen Dawn

I’m all for the examined life, but not at the expense of my happiness. I am not obliged to believe the Dawkinsian view of life is true.

Better a happy drunk than a sad sober man.

“By no means a necessity of life”?! What’s he talking about?! It was, for me, a necessity of life to believe that death is not the end, because I practically failed to function normally when I believed death is!

That whole passage from Shaw is indicative that Shaw didn’t walk a mile in any shoes except his own.

Biff the unclean

But that leaves you with the problem of knowing that your world view is based only on a lack of intestinal fortitude. So you already know that you are faking it in the vain hope of 'feeling better'. Self deception only really works if you aren't wise to the stunt you are pulling...but you aren't fooling you.

Tornado Watch

Why so many theists?

One word. Fear.

Hitetlen

If this is not a sad comment, I don't know what is. To prefer drunken stupor to the beauty of reality is incredibly depressing.

Why so few atheists? Simple: brainwashing from childhood. It is very difficult to throw away something that has been taught from an early age.

Biff the unclean

Yes, but I don't think it's fear of any boogeyman in the sky. It's fear of Christians. After all it wasn't all that long ago that Atheism was a capital offense.

I hear preachers on the radio complain constantly about Christians who just go through the motions. They go to church, chant the prayers, and sing the songs but they don't "lead the Christian life." They aren't truely (according to the ministers) Christians.
So in answer to the question of why aren't there more Atheists I'd say that there are more Atheists. For safety sake they stay "in the closet" But their preachers know they are there and it bugs the hell out of them.

BruceWane

I'd say that "thinking better" confers a survival advantage in the traditionally known evolutionary sense, but I think that the current evolutionary environment for humans is far removed from that. You're thinking in terms of survival on the African plain, but that is not the environment we live in any more.

Our level of intelligence drastically alters evolution in terms of the human race. To a large extent, survival is no longer a factor. The biggest factor is reproductive habits. It's a well known trend that more educated people are having fewer children. While education does not equal intelligence, it's not unreasonable to assume that those with more education tend to have higher intelligence levels. And these traits are passed on to smaller and smaller percentages of the following generation due to higher birth rates among the less educated, less intelligent. Also, we have moved beyond traditional evolution in that we do not act like animals and let the weaker among us die. If we did, a lot of genetically transmitted afflictions would be long gone. So basically I think that increasing intelligence has short-circuited the evolutionary process, altered it such that in the case of humans, evolution does not necessarily equal improvement of the species in the way we would normally define "improvement" in any other species. The biggest factors in modern evolution of humans are cultural, not environmental or physical.

So basically, in the case of humans, a physical or mental "survival advantage" no longer equals an evolutionary trend.

Now, please don't take this as any endorsement of eugenics, 'cause it's not. I'm not saying we should proactively control evolution through selective breeding or anything, I'm just analyzing what is. Technically, we could improve the human species by such actions, but could does not equal should; and who's to say what is considered "improvement"?

Heathen Dawn

I’m not fooling myself. My beliefs are only unproved, not disproved. You know what it would be to fool myself? For example, to be a Mormon—to believe in a book whose historicity has actually been disproved (elaboration here).

What “beauty of reality” are you talking about?! Hasn’t it been a staple of atheistic arguments against an omnibenevolent God that reality isn’t beautiful by any stretch of imagination?

King Rat

Not anything I've ever read or advocated. Reality can be awful, but that doesn't preclude beauty. Reality just is.