Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions... If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.
And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.
Despite the Great Chain of Being’s traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow ‘aimed’ at humans, or that humans are ‘evolution’s last word’.
The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.
I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Los genes operan de manera misteriosa.
The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped.
Science doesn’t have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.
Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God.
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Religion is a distraction from true education.
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.
Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God.
Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
The nervous system has a rule that says, ‘Any trial action that is followed by reward should be repeated. Any trial action that is followed by nothing, or, worse, followed by punishment, for example pain, should not be repeated.
I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.