These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t be all right.
Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love.
Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.
I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, or life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase ‘Christian child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection.
A scientific theorum has not been – cannot be – proved in the way a mathematical theorem is proved.
Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators.
Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as ’intelligent design theory.
As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicle.
Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust- storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time. Populations may last a long while, but they are constantly blending with other populations and so losing their identity.
We don’t usually see this happening but, like detectives arriving on the scene after a crime, we can piece together what must have happened from the evidence that remains.
The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy ‘to do your believing for you’. The de luxe model is advertised as ‘Capable of believing things they wouldn’t believe in Salt Lake City’.
I define a replicator as anything in the universe of which copies are made.
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
Replicators may be classified in two ways. They may be ‘active’ or ‘passive’, and, cutting across this classification, they may be ‘germ-line’ or ‘dead-end’ replicators.
This is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religious book. I have done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again.
Listen to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University: ‘AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.’121.
To describe the forests of the world as its ‘lungs’ does no harm, and it might do some good if it encourages people to preserve them. But the rhetoric of holistic harmony can degenerate into a kind of dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism.
A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.