The Zeitgeist, it's darker than you think

"Zeitgeist," it means "the spirit of the age and its society." It describes, according to Wikipedia, the intellectual, cultural, ethical, moral and political climate of an age. Supposedly, the Zeitgeist can only be interpreted for past ages. Of course, everyone who knows the word still tries to interpret the Zeitgeist of their own age. For example, Christopher Hitchens called the election of Barack Obama a "Zeitgeist Election."



Richard Dawkins talked about the shifting moral Zeitgeist:



That word, "Zeitgeist," does seem to be popular with a lot of so-called "new atheists." Which is a bit odd when you consider that the German Romantics who coined the word took the "spirit" part of its definition a bit more literally. Yet there certainly does seem to be a huge cultural shift in progress. It's why Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett are selling more books now than they could have just a decade before. After all, it's not like no one had been publishing atheist books before.

Prometheus Books had been publishing atheistic books for decades before Sam Harris hit it big with "The End of Faith." A book that he wrote soon after 9/11 dealing with the dangerous nature of irrational and violent religions and adding a new vehemence in the atheist critique:



George Carlin could, in a way, sum up some of that a lot quicker:



Long before Sam Harris wrote his books, George H. Smith wrote "Atheism: The Case Against God," (1980) and James Porter Moreland and Kai Nielsen wrote "Does God Exist?: The Debate Between Theists & Atheists," and Lloyd M. Graham wrote "Deceptions And Myths Of The Bible." None of those books sold as well as anything written by Dawkins ever did and those few Prometheus books are just a tip on an iceberg of atheistic books that most of us don't even know about.

Prometheus Books still publish such books and they still don't approach the sales figures of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris in spite of the times we live in. In the meantime the slow trend toward American unbelief continues with the latest polls and surveys noting that "More Americans Say They Have No Religion." Those of us saying we have no religion have gone up from 8.2 percent in 1990, to 14.2 percent in 2001, to 15 percent in 2008. While there are more Catholics in California, Texas and Florida, the increase is attributed mostly to Latino immigration. Christians who aren't Catholic are now a declining segment of the country. While still growing, the growth of non-belief has slowed a bit. Alas, at this rate, a percentage point or so per decade, I won't be around any more by the time non-belief is the majority opinion... if that ever were to happen.

Sam Harris's question about whether we can expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely is still an open question. And there is no real cure for the condition in sight. The only thing that has changed is that people who are asking that same question are now making money for being willing to voice it in public. It would seem that books decrying religion’s negative influence on the world becoming bestsellers is a good sign.

Another good sign might be Christian Science Monitor author, Michael Spencer, worrying about "The coming evangelical collapse." Spencer's predictions only apply to evangelicalism, only one group of protestant Christians now slowly losing ground.

In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I'm convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

I wish... sort of. I just want them to be a lot less politically influential.

And this was one of the reasons Mr. Spencer identified for the coming collapse:

Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

And, indeed, I do think they are bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society. But the unstable mix of Christianity and Ayn Rand style libertarianism was doomed to failure and loaded with potential conflicts from the beginning. We'll now, I think, see those conflicts surfacing in the GOP.

However, Mr. Spencer's concept of a coming "anti-Christian age in Western history" is off the mark. Christians are still a big majority and the numbers of non-believers is not growing fast enough for any kind of "anti-Christian age." What is more likely is that new politically influential Christian leaders, like Rick Warren, will come under the sway of Barack Obama and work on Obama's policies, forcing concessions from him. As more light is shed on the Bush Administration's failures, and perhaps even crimes, the GOP will be abandoned by large chunks of what was once the Christian right. Then we might wind up with something worse -- a Christian left.

For awhile it seemed that evangelicals had gained a lot of political power and the Bush administration was the representation of that power and influence. Rove once talked of a permanent Republican majority. But the mix was unstable and Obama made a clear effort to appeal to fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. It was a key to his success. And his political move could create a new, more stable and less conflicted, political force that still embraces all the scientific ignorance we saw in the Christian right.

It really depends on the outcome of the "science wars." A slightly increasing number of non-believers is irrelevant if we are recruiting them only from the already more rational side of the Christian faith. What you want to really see is a shift in science literacy and you want to see opinions on things like evolution changing. But they're not. Religioustolerance.org has a page showing that as of 2007 the creationist view seems to have gained ground when compared to earlier polls. Yet, at the same time, support for naturalistic evolution had also increased. It suggests that we are becoming more polarized and belief in the compromise "theistic evolution" position, evolution but under God's guidance, lost ground.

The forces of ignorance as represented by people like Ben Stein, Ray Comfort and Vox Day have their counterparts on the left, like Tony Campolo and Deepak Chopra.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-- Carl Sagan

If you'd like to get an idea of how deep that ignorance goes then I suggest taking a little internet trip over to Ray Comfort's site and checking out the comments of some of Ray's followers. For example, Chris Geiser who writes:

They are not lying they are just misinformed and blinded by their own lasciviousness and concupiscence and probate minds. They won’t even allow creationists to have any public say in what they have discovered scientifically without any bias. I am not surprised, however, that scientists discredit creationists, because ‘science’ back in the day did not agree with peoples’ theories of how the Earth is a sphere and I believe they made quite an effort to shut them up. They only got credit when the world found out they were right all along. They believed it to be true and they had enough faith to journey out onto uncharted ocean to prove their theory, and I am sure they didn’t go on those seemingly suicidal expeditions because they had a death wish, but because they had faith. They did not go with the crowd and play it safe.

As they say on PZ's blog: "The stupid - it burns!"

I don’t swallow any lies. I only take in Truth. I do not rely on any man to give me truth but only God from His Word and from having faith and by praying. If a man says anything that aligns with scripture than I know he is telling the truth. Science books today are written by men who seek to hide information on how God’s hand has a place in history. I believe Ray posted a while ago on how it is possible that the Grand Canyon was formed during and shortly after the great flood and it sure seems reasonable to me and it aligns with scripture.

How can such ignorance not be part of the Zeitgeist when polls show such opinions are horrifyingly common in America?

If only it were a Poe.

He'll argue with me, but he won't tell me about it.

As you might see if you check the comments on my post, "Aquinas and Plantinga, part 1", there has been no comment from Kenneth Hynek about debating the issue. However, he did write a post, “Everything grows clear in the reflections from the Infinite,” where he addresses me:

No doubt the likes of recent commentator Norman Doering will object to the proposition that there is something inherently Christian about the Western scientific notion that rational inquiry will be rewarded with rational information, but it must still be said: at the core of modern science, the belief is still very much alive that it is only by seeking that we shall find, and only by knocking that we will see things opened unto us…and that our seeking will be rewarded with findings, that our knocking will be rewarded with openings.

As a matter of fact I do object to the claim that there is something inherently Christian about the "Western scientific notion" that rational inquiry will be rewarded with rational information. The idea that Rational inquiry will be rewarded with rational information is human, not Christian. I think I can demonstrate the falsity of his claim by pointing out that it was Pagan Greeks who really got the process of scientific inquiry off the ground for the West:






And while the West was slumbering through a scientific dark age after Christian culture had demolished Greek science Muslims had a big contribution to make. And India had some remarkable scientists.

"I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has continued to put out of sight our obligations to the Muhammadans (Muslims). Surely they cannot be much longer hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancour and national conceit cannot be perpetuated forever. The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe. He has indelibly written it on the heavens as any one may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe."
-- John William Draper in the "Intellectual Development of Europe"

The claim that Western science owes, perhaps its entire existence, to the Biblical underpinnings of Western society is seriously exaggerated to say the least. His claim that supernatural revelation, as registered in the Bible, is germane to science is unsupported.

It was under the influence of the arabs and Moorish revival of culture and not in the 15th century, that a real renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and Toledo, were growing centers of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of new life.

It was under their successors at Oxford School (that is, successors to the Muslims of Spain) that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences. Neither Roger Bacon nor later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Sciences was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussion as to who was the originator of the experimental method....are part of the colossal misinterpretation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental method of Arabs was by Bacon's time widespread and eagerly cultivated throughout Europe.
-- Robert Briffault in the "Making of Humanity"

Modern science does not depend on the assumptions that the universe itself is rational, only that it is intelligible to rational minds and that is not really an assumption, that was demonstrated long before Christianity existed.

Also, on the blog post where I left my previous comment Kenneth Hynek decided to insult me after he declined the debate while continuing to argue his point:

...when you ask this:

Why must a “First Cause” be simple or immutable? And what does simplicity and immutability even mean in this context?

You demonstrate not only that the works of Plantinga and Aquinas are several degrees above your pay grade (I am speaking here of the difference in pay grade between janitor and CEO, in fact), but also demonstrate that your own position — whatever it is — is fundamentally unmoored from a basic understanding of reason itself.

Actually, I think it's Mr. Hynek who perhaps doesn't grasp what reason is and that he has chosen this insult option because he knows he can't explain his assertion that a “First Cause” must be simple and immutable. Though I must confess that I'm no big reader of Plantinga or Aquinas and I often don't have a clue as to why they make the screwy assertions they make.

Instead of dealing with Plantinga and Aquinas he is proceeding on his own into the realm of quantum mechanics. To my assertion that "if the first cause is merely a quantum fluctuation, then a quantum fluctuation is God. But quantum fluctuations do not have mental qualities, they don’t have emotions or thoughts," he replied:

Given how little we even understand about the intricacies of quantum fluctuations, your statement is speculation at best, despite your presentation of it as hard fact.

While it's true that I can't be one hundred percent certain that quantum fluctuations don't have emotions or thoughts it's not mere speculation that they don't. After all, Mr. Hynek also can't be sure that the chair he is sitting in doesn't have emotions and thoughts and that it doesn't like the smell of his farts. Would he consider it rational to speculate that his chair resents his farts?

It is rather off the wall to suppose that chairs and quantum fluctuations do have such things. There is simply no good reason, aside from trying to shoehorn in a religious supposition into physics, to assume that a quantum fluctuation has emotions or thoughts. What magical, supernatural replacement for neural circuitry would generate their emotions or thoughts?

In fact, by stating this possibility it is in fact Kenneth Hynek who has demonstrated that it is he who lacks a critical tool of rational scientific thought. That tool is called, rather loosely by its enemies, "the assumption of naturalism," or by its friends, "methodological naturalism."



Does he really want to argue that quantum fluctuations do have emotions and thoughts? Probably not, but he might be trying to claim that they are how God acts in the world.

And while I appreciate that your position is so flimsy to begin with that it requires this kind of sleight of hand, don’t expect me to let said sleight of hand go unremarked upon.

Asserting that quantum fluctuations do not have emotions and thoughts is sleight of hand? Seems like common sense and the assumption of naturalism to me. I could tell Mr. Hynek a lot about the use of methodological naturalism in scientific reasoning, but apparently he can explain nothing about his methods of reasoning.

We know that a quantum fluctuation is a temporary change in the amount of energy at a particular point in space, in apparent violation of the law of conservation of energy. But what does that really tell us? Could a change in energy not be a function of will, albeit a will beyond our ability to comprehend or accurately articulate a description of?

We have ways of testing for mental abilities in animals, perhaps we should have physicists test for this ability in subatomic particles?

In response to my statement: If you think God has mental qualities like “intention,” “knowledge,” “will,” “emotion,” “desire” etc. then how can you even imagine those are simple? You’re talking about some magical form of human-like intelligence that needs no material substrate and of which there is no example to point to. He wrote:

Or I’m talking about something that clunky human language cannot serve to adequately describe, using the clunky human language that is my only means of offering a cogent attempt at a description.

It's not so much, I suspect, a concept that cannot be adequately described as it is an ancient mistake about the source of our mental attributes that religious people refuse to explore rationally. Before neuroscience began to locate mental activity in the brain the ancients assumed that there were "souls" and "spirits" that gave men their mental attributes and animated their bodies. Interestingly, some of the ancient words often translated into soul or spirit in the Bible could also mean wind and breath and ghost. It suggests that the concept of soul and spirit was a biological misunderstanding. The ancients thought that breath, spiritus in Latin, was the force that differentiated a living body from a dead body. Living people breathed, dead people didn't. Breath is a physical event, your breath also exists outside your body momentarily, so spirits can exist outside the body. And you can have spirit possession and invisible ghosts floating about in the air and acting like the wind.

Neuroscience doesn't use the words "spirit" or "soul." Neuroscientists talk about receptors, and neurotransmitters, and electrical circuits, and so forth. Do you think we should go back to talking about spirits?

You assume, I think, a certain blindness to these cosmological forces; from whence do you get this erroneous notion that these forces are in any way blind?

From their statistically predictable regularity. What about the behavior of quantum fluctuations would suggest otherwise?

Could it be, instead, that you feel a deep-seated fear at the idea that things may exist which defy human observation or description?

Maybe you're the one who is afraid?

there’s no way at all we could even begin to have a meaningful discussion, because your position is grounded in several levels of irrationality and unreason. And I, for one, don’t see the need to attempt to forge something meaningful out of something that will only ever rise to the level of a dog’s breakfast.

Well, there you go. He is saying that my poor little god-given brain can not comprehend and grasp the vast mysteries that he understands. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a sadomasochist when I asked why they liked such things. I was told something similar to:

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

Just replace the word faith with desire.

Pretending to think like Ray Comfort

The perverse and ungodly sex life of bananas


On the header to Ray Comfort's blog he claimed that his old video comparing a coke can to a banana was intended as a parody. No, this video is an intentional parody:



And this:


Can you see the difference? (Actually I have a hard time with some satire because there are so many religious believers whose beliefs sound like satire).

Ray also says:

Atheists edited the coke can from a video clip and sent it around the world, saying that I believed that the banana was proof of the existence of God.

But that's exactly what Ray did say, that God created the banana. And he still says it having never grasped what critics meant. Ray is an amazingly bald-faced liar (and I'm not sure if he knows he is lying he is so deeply immersed in the world of his delusions). Does he really think the coke can part added anything to his point? He was comparing one man made product to another. The old video is on YouTube and Ray comes right out and says it:



Note those words: "You'll find that the maker of the banana, the almighty God... Just like soda can makers, God has placed a tab at the top..." etc.. As many of my readers probably know already, that's not how things really happened, but stick with me, I'll take you deeper into Ray's mistakes. Ray clearly didn't know that bananas, like many of the other plants we eat (and animals for that matter), are a product of thousands of years of human selection. Man designed the banana. As far as being natural and wild goes, Ray could hardly have picked a worse example.

His fundamental point was that God designed modern bananas, and evolution isn't true, and on that point he is dead wrong. Wild bananas have seeds, ancient bananas were barely edible, but the common banana Ray used in the video was cultivated and made seedless. His banana example cannot sexually reproduce. It's a clone. Those bananas are grown from offshoots of the parent plant rather than through the process of sex and fertilization that might otherwise take place.

One result of that is that the banana's genetic information hasn't changed as much as it could have if it were mixing its genes up sexually and evolving that way. The problem is that the world of plant diseases has evolved and changed and our commercial bananas were in danger because they haven't kept up. However, genetic engineering may come to the rescue.

That ties into another question Ray doesn't understand -- why sex evolved. Recall Ray's comically inept understanding of sexual evolution:

"Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half ("Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half)." Ask A Scientist, Biology Archive, http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99927.htm.)" -- Ray Comfort

Darwin theorized no such thing. Ray just bald-face lied to everybody again. Ray reads a few sentences from a science article and then thinks scientists are postulating that men and women were two separate species before sex evolved? How ignorant can someone get? There was no 'mankind', or anything remotely close to it when sexual genders evolved.

All sexually reproducing organisms derive from some very ancient common ancestor which may have been a single celled eukaryotic species. Many protists reproduce sexually, as do the multicellular plants, animals, and fungi. At the latest, sex may have developed in primitive ancestors that more resembled sponges and worms because there are some species of worm and sponge that are not quite sexually differentiated. Some worms are asexual. Plants haven't even differentiated much from each other as many plants can reproduce asexually. There are only a few animal species which have lost gender differentiation.

However, Ray isn't entirely wrong to point to sex if he wants to baffle "evolutionists" for there are indeed some profound mysteries to why sex evolved. Wouldn't parthenogenesis have a reproductive advantage over sexual reproduction? After all, with sex, half the species can't have babies. Well, Wikipedia's "Evolution of Sexual Reproduction" has some information about what scientists are actually proposing, but it's mostly rather abstract. And I could show you a good bit of probable answers to when and how sex evolved, but one of the big mysteries for me was why it evolved -- that is until I did a bit more research on Ray's bananas. With the banana we get a pragmatic example of why sex is necessary and why it dominates the animal kingdom.

As noted above, Ray, if geneticists (almost always "evolutionists") can't save the banana, may no longer have bananas to use in his videos. Ray's modern world would fall apart if there were no evolutionists.



Ray makes comically asinine remarks on his blog and his television series, regarding subjects about which he knows nothing. When Ray is called on his ignorance, instead of admitting he was ignorant of all this science, he simply lies, just like when he said the banana bit was him doing comedy on purpose. He obviously wasn't because the real story of the banana is a powerful argument for evolution which he doesn't believe happened.

By not admitting to his mistake he has clued us all into the fact that he will lie to cover his errors. Why? His ego perhaps, or perhaps he wants to keep his reputation among his followers who appear to be dumber than he is. When Ray is factually wrong, as he often is, he refuses to admit it (take his banana video, please). If he really wanted to convince us that he had some important truth to impart he wouldn't try to lie his way out of these jams he gets himself into. It's rare to find a Christian one can argue in good faith with. You'll note that none have shown up in the comments section on my blog to argue my points in a long time. Too many sacrifice my potential faith and trust in at least their honesty to protect their egos and cover over their ignorance, a task they generally fail to accomplish. They rarely enter into the arguments in good faith or with a sense of mutual exploration of reality. They always come apreachin':

Ray Comfort's devious ignorance amazes me yet again

This is kind of funny, Ray Comfort is challenging Richard Dawkins to a debate – and he is sweetening the deal by offering Dawkins $10,000:

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89453

Dawkins' last book, The God Delusion, sold over 1.5 million copies, and has been translated to 31 other languages. His books have been selling well since 1976 when he published The Selfish Gene, the book that put Dawkins on the map as an intellectual heavyweight. He has TV specials on British TV.

$10,000 is just chump change to Dawkins. It's probably asking for a bargain in light of Dawkins' speaking fees. And Dawkins has already said that he will not debate creationists because appearing with them gives them too much credit.

Ray Comfort is just an annoying nobody, a street corner preacher who would get too much undeserved credit from even appearing on stage with Dawkins. If you don't know who Ray Comfort is, check out this post and this one.

I, however, would debate Ray for half of what he is offering Dawkins.

I challenge you Ray to save $5,000 and debate me instead. Are you chicken, or does $5,000 mean nothing to you, Ray?

UPDATE:

PZ Myers, at Pharyngula, reports that Dawkins has heard about the challenge and made a counter offer. Dawkins will do it for $100,000, to be donated to the RDF. Comfort upped the ante to $20,000. It's not enough for Dawkins.

Religion as a force for ignorance and delusion

Over at richarddawkins.net there's an article, "The coming religious peace," by Alan Wolfe, originally from The Atlantic magazine.

The article came with a graph that suggests that there is an inverse correlation between a country's religiosity and its per capita GDP, or, in simpler terms, the more religious a country is, the poorer it will be:

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE

Toward the right and bottom corner of the graph are the most-prosperous and irreligious countries. At the very bottom is Western Europe, where, as Mr. Wolfe says, "God, if not dead, has only a faint pulse." Here we find Sweden, Britan and France.

Toward the left and top corner, poor yet very religious countries like Nigeria, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt.

There are some exceptions to the trend, countries that don't quite line up on the trend line, like Kuwait and the United States. However, both countries happen to have a greater share of valuable natural resources. Kuwait is oil rich and the United States was also once oil wealthy, but we peaked back in the 1970s and started importing, as well as having an abundance of other natural resources. And there are plenty of countries not on the list, like Saudi Arabia, I assume it is wealthy and religious, and Estonia which I think is irreligious and poor which might make one question how this chart was put together.

Was it edited to create that trend line? I doubt it. It's from the Pew Global Attitudes Project and Pew isn't known to skew data against religion.

But even if the sampling is truly random the graph still doesn't prove that religion and GDP are causually connected. Certainly other factors are probably contributing to the various clusters of countries on that graph. Also, as I've said before, correlation just doesn't automatically equal causality and just because we'd like something to be true, doesn't make it true. However, in this case it might be possible to establish a rather obvious mechanism for how, at least certain forms of, religiosity contribute to the poverty of a country.

If you read PZ Myers' blog, Pharyngula, then you probably already know where I'm going with this. PZ is always ranting against some creationist and pointing out their ignorance, lies and delusions. It gets repetitive because the creationists are repetitive.

For example, a recent post by PZ in this regard is "Florida: Land of the Delusional." It's a short commentary on Donna Callaway's editorial in the Florida Baptist Witness that makes clear, yet again, that her reasons for rejecting evolution are religious.

Callaway masks her desire to impose her brand of ideological ignorance in a call for "student rights," "her religious identity" and "the example of Jesus as a master teacher." She is clearly, as PZ says, "swaddled in meters-thick layers of delusion" having "drunk deep of the Kool-Aid." And this kind of religiously inspired ignorance has economic consequences. Donna Callaway wants to change the way our children are educated. And this old chart, which corresponds roughly with the economic chart, is a measure of the success people like Callaway have had:

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE

Many of the countries where acceptance of evolution is high are those same high GDP western European countries on the first chart, like Sweden and France. Japan is also high in accepting evolution and high on GDP. And the low GDP countries are also generally there, like Turkey, low on accepting evolution and low on GDP.

It's not hard to see why and predict it will get worse. It's one of the things that came out during the Dover trial, the way Behe wanted to redefine what science was to the point where astrology became a science. Rejecting evolution necessarily implies rejecting all the kinds of scientific thought processes that lead us to accept it. And those scientific thought processes are economically important, now more so than ever.

We’re now living in the 21st century and our economies are going to be more and more scientifically and technologically driven. It's not just the obvious new fields, like biotech and genetic engineering, which are only recently becoming economically important enough to significantly effect GDP. It's also older scientific knowledge bases, like geologists hired by the oil industry to use a knowledge of Earth's deep history to find oil.

While there are indeed Christian biologists, for example, Francis Collins and Ken Miller, who can accept the theory of evolution and remain self-identified as Christians they are not typical of either Christians or scientists.

While scientists are more atheistic than the rest of the population generally, those who publish in peer reviewed journals, the serious hard core scientists, are even more atheistic than those who merely have a degree. The more "hard core" the scientists the more atheistic.

I offer this to you as a question: Is atheism economically important?