What if perfection means having knowledge of both good and evil?
Perhaps the ability to do evil, such as lying, is just an inherent possibility of self awareness combined with the ability to create and think for oneself?
Not sure what Bible you're reading, but I see a punishing, vengeful, loving and caring God throughout all of scripture.
There are plenty of instances in the OT where God showed mercy, leniency, grace, etc. . .
Many times, even after some of His most terrifying pronouncements, He said to just turn away from your wicked ways and I'll forgive you.
Survival of the fittest, perhaps?
But this wouldn't explain the "preacher's daughter" types or those that suddenly become atheist regardless of generations of believers.
Millions of Christians and other religious types have been killed for their beliefs as apposed to a handful of witches.
By your logic, one could say that religions propensity to kill non believers is an evolutionary trait. But that's just as ridiculous. That is not how evolution works. For starters evolution is a process involving genetic shifts in populations, not individuals.
You're talking about evolutionary psychology which is just unreliable at this time. There are serious questions regarding testability and cognitive assumptions, such as modular brain functioning and the uncertainty of various ancestral environments.
Even if you consider faith a phenotypic trait, given coalescent theory, the average number of generations required to fix an allele in a diploid population is 4 times the effective population, times the selection coefficient of the trait in question.
In other's words, Atheism doesn't really stand a chance. Even if Christianity dies, you'll just end up with a bunch of other faith based populations.
None of this really matters of course, since religion is just a byproduct of evolution anyway.
The propensity toward faith is practically in all of us regardless of how hard you want to fight it.
But whatever, carry on. I just felt the need to respond to your rather misguided use of genetics/evolution in this manner. . .
