My two cents:
1. People who worship power or money are worshipping something tangible and measurable. The US has more power than Yemen--we can measure that by GDP, the number of fighter air craft, etc.
2. By definition, a deity is not tangible or measurable.
Foster, I think, is using "worship" in two different senses--obsessive pursuit of a goal vs. adoration of a non-tangible being-- and this is misleading.
3. On the other hand, if you really listen to atheists, you will see that some kind of theistic belief will often slip in. I have talked to militant atheists who find the idea of dying and not existing so hard to fathom that they speculate on reincarnation, for example.
I also find Richard Dawkins's insistence man has transcended his evolutionary history to be an introduction of religion through the back door. He asserts this is true but does not define a mechanism by which we do this. If our brain is the product of evolution, what exactly CAN transcend it? Is there some part of us that is above or apart from neurology? Isn't this almost the same thing as a soul?
Dawkins offers weak examples to support this belief. For example, he asserts that the use of birth control shows that man transcends his evolutionary instincts.
I think he deliberately misses the main issue. The goal is not to have the MOST children but to have the most SURVIVING children--and later descendants. In some environments, especially unstable ones, people producing lots of kids and investing relatively little in each child will enhance their fitness.
In stable environments, it may be better to have fewer children and invest more in each one.
And even in unstable environments, fewer kids may be better in the sense of enhancing genetic fitness. Who had more surviving descendants in the following cases?
1. The Holocaust. A family with two or three children who are all highly educated might have a better chance of having surviving descendants because those kids have skills that can get them visas to other countries. The family with 10 children could not educate them all and they could not get out.
2. The same idea with war zones like Iraq. Engineers can get visas. Shopkeepers and street sweepers, probably not.
3. American inner cities: families who lose children to street violence, prolonged incarceration--when they can't reproduce--and other tragedies might have fewer living descendants than a wealthy family with fewer children who receive better health care and education.
4. People are smart enough to know that if they reproduce without limit and exhaust the ability of their environment to feed them, their own genetic fitness will be impaired. Thus, birth control is in accord with the ideas of sociobiology and not opposed to them.
