Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
If you need a geography lesson in order to know where Africa is – if, by age seventeen, you have somehow failed to imbibe such knowledge by osmosis or simple curiosity – you surely don’t have the sort of mind that would benefit from a university education.
The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.
Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, ‘for the good of the mammals’?
Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century.
Next to the true beauty and magic of the real world, supernatural spells and stage tricks seem cheap and tawdry by comparison. The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but – quite simply – wonderful. Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.
What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue?
Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn’t that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
It was harder to work out that there was a question than to think of the answer.
I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi’s idea that altruistic donation might be a ‘Potlatch’ style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!
There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of.
The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.
Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst – none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It.
Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.