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 trajectory through multidimensional space, in which every step of the way has to represent a body capable of surviving and reproducing about as well as the parental type reached by the preceding step of the trajectory.
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.
In any case, you won’t get rich doing science, so why do it at all if you undermine the only point of the enterprise by lying?
There are so many different faiths. How do you know the holy book you have been brought up with is the true one? And if all the others are wrong, what makes you think your holy book isn’t wrong too?
The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.
It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when i defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can’t see it – or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy books.
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.
Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.
It is raining DNA outside.
There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.
All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert Sherman’s report of George Bush Senior’s answer when Sherman asked him whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists: ‘No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
The placebo effect is well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It’s why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo control – zero molecules.