Incidentally, Vox also vastly oversimplifies the question of what an evolutionary advantage is. High birth rate is only an advantage when resources are plentiful and/or when few juveniles survive to adulthood. A command to “be fruitful and multiply” could actually have an adverse evolutionary effect if the population is trying to cope with insufficient resources. If the environment can support a population of 1,000, and the population gives birth to 10,000 offspring, that doesn’t mean that 1,000 individuals are going to have enough and 9,000 are going to starve, that means that 10,000 are not going to have enough, and the survival rate will likely be far below what it would have been with a much lower birth rate. Grandkids are how evolution keeps score, and more offspring can mean fewer grandkids.

Vox takes studies about populations in environmentally stressed conditions, and concludes from these that religious people have an advantage over non-religious people, but his reasoning is badly flawed in his selection of examples to cite, and in his failure to consider critical environmental factors before drawing his conclusions, and in his extrapolation of these limited, special-case examples as a model for religion’s alleged evolutionary advantages across millennia of human history in widely varying circumstances. I wouldn’t go putting too much stock in this particular argument if I were you.

Since this is Vox’s reply to Dennett’s question about the evolutionary advantage of religion, I believe my remarks are both accurate and on topic for the argument they address.

Except you’re taking an example that he gives, and conflating an entire argument out of it that doesn’t exist. You end up committing the exact error you accuse Vox of in the end (‘He’s got an axe to grind, and some talking points he wants to raise in “rebuttal”’), making yourself no better.

How, one wonders, does Dennett fail to grasp that a creed which explicitly states “go forth and multiply” is likely to be inordinately successful in evolutionary terms, genetic or memetic?

Since this is Vox’s reply to Dennett’s question about the evolutionary advantage of religion, I believe my remarks are both accurate and on topic for the argument they address.

You are correct that Vox also makes a distinction between religion in general and Christianity in particular. It all depends on the need of the moment. He boasts about the superior fecundity of the religious versus the irreligious in the quote above, but he also brags about the religious being more chaste than the unbelievers. The problem of believers being simultaneously more sexually active and less sexually active than unbelievers, is a problem that doesn’t really seem to bother him, as long as he can say the believer is superior somehow.

No, not really, because it’s more typical of Vox to use “religious” as though the Judeo-Christian religion were the only significant religion out there.

Really? You should go back and reread chapter 1 (especially pages 12-13) where he deals with Harris… well how does the footnote put it?
“I’m sure those millions of Buddhists must be deeply appreciative of a Jewish-American atheist informing them that their 2,500-year-old religion is not a religion at all.”
In fact, Vox frequently mentions other religions in the same vein throughout the book, so there seems to be no basis for your statement. (you should go back and reread page 68 as well, where he calls out the atheists’ tendency to not attack all religions equally)

Remember, Vox’s original claim was that religion has an evolutionary advantage over non-religion because the command “Be fruitful and multiply” is going to increase the offspring of those who obey it.

No it isn’t. He mentions an established fact, (religious breed more than non, generally regardless of creed) and uses just one religion as an example. Take out the sentence that includes the quote “go forth and multiply” and his argument suffers none.

Vox seems to like the argument that religious people are more likely to reproduce than non-religious people—as though nobody really cared much one way or another about sex until Moses came along and showed them in Genesis 1!

DD… how exactly do pagans (aka non-Jews) fit into “non-religious”?

Has Vox ever examined a journal in cognitive science, cognitive psychology, or cognitive neuroscience? Somehow I doubt it. We have scores of models of cognitive mechanisms and architectures, specified in excruciating quantitative detail that most certainly have successful predictive track records, verified by experiment, and accounting for numerous aspects of human cognitive performance. True, there is no integrated mechanistic theory of mental life with the kind of predictive accuracy you see in physics, but that’s irrelevant….No discipline EVER needs “amazingly accurate” formulas to outclass religion and theology in this department…even just a little accuracy is sufficient. Cognitive science in its short history has a track record of empirical success, many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than religion.

I don’t find it ironic, I find it incorrect. Religious beliefs have changed, and keep on changing. Any one who tells you otherwise is ignorant or lying. What’s happening is those who are making the changes try to make the new beliefs acceptable by claiming that’s what was believed all along by the founders of the religion.

Then, to argue that science’s efficacy should be judged field by field is ridiculous. If any one believed as Vox argues no one would feel biology was necessary, having been proved by physics. We have biologists because we have questions about biology, not because we have all the answers.

“Between the two of us, we just might get to the heart of the matter.”
Hey, good luck with that.