Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.
It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?
The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.
An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If.
Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.
To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.
They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
If I’d been born in ancient Greece, I’d worship Zeus and Aphrodite.
My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.
But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.
There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection.
Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state.
A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In.
Turns’ and ‘fairness’ simply don’t come into it. We may care about fairness and unfairness, but coins don’t give a toss!
I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements.
Natural selection is a strong enough theory to be predictive in this fashion, now that science no longer needs convincing of its truth.
A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.