People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children – especially, apparantly, their daughters.
Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Atheism, a term which will, I’m sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...
If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
If nobody cares, then it doesn’t matter what happens to flowers.
Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
Words have a genealogy and it’s easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
There are no good reasons to believe in god.
It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.