If you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing.
Similarly, we can all agree that science’s entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad?
Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility.
But we exist now. We are caring, intelligent animals and can treasure our brief lives. Why is eternal better than temporal, or supernatural “higher” than natural? Doesn’t rarity increase value? God is an idea, not a natural creature. Why should his “image” be more valuable than our own “nature?
And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage.
As a lifelong teacher, I fret about where we go wrong in education.
It is the joy of true education: of reading for the sake of a wonderful book rather than for an exam; of following up a subject because it is fascinating rather than because it is on a syllabus; of watching a great teacher’s eyes light up for sheer love of the subject.
Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.
One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don’t know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don’t know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.
Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.
If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.
I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement.
It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
A gene is not indivisible, but it is seldom divided. It is either definitely present or definitely absent in the body of any given individual. A gene travels intact from grandparent to grandchild, passing straight through the intermediate generation without being merged with other genes. If genes continually blended with each other, natural selection as we now understand it would be impossible.
As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious.
The life of any one physical DNA molecule is quite short – perhaps a matter of months, certainly not more than one lifetime. But a DNA molecule could theoretically live on in the form of copies of itself for a hundred million years.
The sight of her child smiling, or the sound of her kitten purring, is rewarding to a mother, in the same sense as food in the stomach is rewarding to a rat in a maze. But once it becomes true that a sweet smile or a loud purr are rewarding, the child is in a position to use the smile or the purr in order to manipulate the parent, and gain more than its fair share of parental investment.
If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.
Evolution is the process by which some genes become more numerous and others less numerous in the gene pool.
Firstly, we could ban reproduction before a certain age, say forty. After some centuries of this the minimum age limit would be raised to fifty, and so on. It is conceivable that human longevity could be pushed up to several centuries by this means.