The more religious a person is the more likely they have more children:
"It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favour those with religious beliefs," said Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany who carried out the study. "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century."
The idea that being religious is an evolutionary advantage is in direct contradiction to theories developed and promoted by atheists like Richard Dawkins who have suggested that religions are like viruses of the mind which infect people and impose great costs in terms of money, time and health risks.
Blume's work suggests the exact opposite - that evolution favours religious believers so strongly that, over time, a tendency to be religious has become embedded in our genes.
The research suggests that the key fact is simply that the more religious people are, the more children they tend to have. This is because most religions place a high value on child-bearing, suggesting it is a holy duty.
Without religion, by contrast, atheists often see far less point in having children and so have smaller families or none at all.
There are, however, other factors too, such as having strong shared religious beliefs allows people to fit into a community more easily, accepting shared tasks and rules of behaviour. This ability to work together further raises the survival chances of children.
In his research into the "Reproductive Advantages of Religion", presented at a recent conference in Bristol, Blume found that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people.
What's more, fundamentalists of all religions have the most children of all. It means atheistic or secular groups tend to die out while fundamentalists of all faiths thrive - a process which means evolution will tend to favour people with a genetic predisposition to hold strong religious beliefs.
Athiests are quite incoherent about evolution and morality. You hear atheist apologists argue that morality is the product of evolution and that things like altruism arise from the fact that altruism works. Things like reciprocity and charity were selected by evolution because they work to ensure the survival of the genes in a community when the community outcompetes communities that lack those programmed traits.
Other times they appeal to a standard beyone evolution. Could it be that enslaving other communities and intolerance of homosexuals are competitive advantages and thereby justified as moral by evolutionary history? Perish the thought; Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and others would deny that simply deny the morality indicated by the darker side of our evolutionary history.
If atheists truly believed that morality is defined by evolutionary psychology, they would promote religion - and adopt forms of religion. But they don't, because they believe in objective morality, which means that they believe in God.
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