We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.
He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.
We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.
A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival.
If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see ‘altruism’, parental care, etc.
I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.
The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do.
But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist?
We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and nay be nay?
It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used – against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them – to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.
There are athletes who believe God helps them win – against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space – thereby presumably depriving somebody else.
As H. L. Mencken said: ‘We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Most of the replicators in the world have won their place in it by defeating all available alternative alleles. The weapons with which they won, and the weapons with which their rivals lost, are their respective phenotypic consequences.
The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.
Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.