“Now imagine two groups of people -- let's call them the secular tribe and the religious tribe -- who subscribe to these two worldviews. Which of the two tribes is more likely to survive, prosper, and multiply? The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.
“Should evolutionists... be surprised, then, to see that religious tribes are flourishing? Throughout the world, religious groups attract astounding numbers of followers and religious people are showing their confidence in their way of life and the future by having more children. By contrast, atheist conventions draw only a handful of embittered souls. One of the largest atheist organizations, American Atheists, has around 2,500 members....
“The important point is not just that atheism is unable to compete with religion in attracting followers, but also that the lifestyle of practical atheism seems to produce listless tribes that cannot even reproduce themselves....
“Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and abortions there outnumber live births by a ratio of two to one. Russia's birthrate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand find themselves in a similar predicament.
“Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birth rates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded, and Eastern European birth rates are comparably low. Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking a strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable ‘last man’ devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche's ‘last man’ is finally here, and his name is Sven.
“Eric Kaufman has noted that in America, where high levels of immigration have helped to compensate for falling native birthrates, birthrates among religious people are almost twice as high as those among secular people. This trend has also been noticed in Europe. What this means is that, by a kind of natural selection, the West is likely to evolve in a more religious direction. This tendency will likely accelerate if Western societies continue to import immigrants from more religious societies, whether they are Christian or Muslim. Thus we can expect even the most secular regions of the world, through the sheer logic of demography, to become less secular over time.”
Dinesh D’Souza, What's So Great About Christianity? 16-17 (2007)
D’Souza’s point that more religious societies have more children appears beyond serious question. The issue is whether religion or some other factor drives the decision to bear children. Many professed Christians, for instance, claim that religion motivates them not to have children. That is, they desire to be good stewards of God’s creation by not bringing into the world more people to consume even more of the earth’s resources. Other Christians maintain that their responsibility is to bring many new children into the world, to fulfill the biblical mandate to be fruitful and multiply. The premise that children are a blessing given by God is the basis of the “quiver full” movement -- http://www.quiverfull.com.
D’Souza argues from a worldview perspective, that religious people have more hope than secularists and that’s why they have more children. This argument is based on the premise that people who believe in eternal life and the return of Jesus Christ to conquer evil and establish a new Kingdom have hope for the future and are willing to bear children in light of this hope. The hope of the secularists, on the other hand, was dashed at the collapse of Nazi Germany, which was the “high water mark” of secularism. In Nazi Germany, science unrestrained by morality had its full fruition, together with master races (the logical consequence of Darwinian “survival of the fittest”) and eugenics testing. The consequential inhumanity of the concentration camps was too much to bear for even hard core secularists, resulting in a lack of hope for a redemptive society based on science. Without hope for a better society or life after death, there is little to inspire a secularist other than pleasure and material goods, and children interfere with both. It is, therefore, no mystery why religious people have more children than secularists.
A Tdj by Jim Davids.
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