God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
It seems to follow from the thesis of this book that there is no important distinction between our ‘own’ genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion sequences. Whether they conflict or cooperate will depend not on their historical origins but on the circumstances from which they stand to gain now.
Not every English sentence beginning with the word “why” is a legitimate question.
Any effect that a meme has on the behaviour of a body bearing it may influence that meme’s chance of surviving.
Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with ‘intelligent design’ by default.
Bush presided over more executions in Texas than any other governor in the state’s history, averaging one death every nine days.
Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?
The same glucose ration was scrupulously administered to all the flasks equally.
There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase ‘non-overlapping magisteria’:.
We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design. Each species is well fitted to its particular way of life.
Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to be have passed down the male line – transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?
The point is the obvious one that selection at any one locus is not independent of selection at other loci.
If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.
Not only do we live in a universe that is capable of producing life. Successive generations of universes progressively evolve to become increasingly the sort of universe that, as a by-product, is capable of producing life.
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.
A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.
Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators.
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.
It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.