Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings.
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.
Nevertheless, they are obviously functional units of great importance, and it is now necessary to establish exactly what their role is.
Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter – as we are evolved to think – ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large.
Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they ‘believe’ they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.
Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly denied to individuals.
There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.
Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend upon each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six numbers may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be.
Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.
Like most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless easily capable of enjoying Vice Versa and Laughing Gas.
The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene.
Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn’t need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.
This doesn’t mean, as I shall continue to argue, that there is a total dearth of reasons or rhymes in evolutionary history. I believe there are recurring patterns. I also believe, though this is more controversial today than it once was, that there are senses in which evolution may be said to be directional, progressive and even predictable. But progress is emphatically not the same thing as progress towards humanity, and we must live with a weak and unflattering sense of the predictable.
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Always devise your rules as if you didn’t know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.
My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast.
Far better, of course, would be to abandon the promotion of religion altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that could fairly be described as obscene.
We can’t prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.
Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.
Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.