It is widely admitted that serious error follows from the uncritical assumption that adaptations are for the good of the species.
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain.
A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi ‘found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from’.51.
Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him – or of an angel or a virgin in blue – with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to ‘Nationalists’ and ‘Loyalists’ respectively.
Mark Twain’s dismissal of the fear of death is another: ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
The denouement is perhaps the most moving scene of her show Letting Go of God.
Ethnic’ in this context is yet another euphemism. What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original usage of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians.6 I.
Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection.
Well, my family has been Catholic for generations, so doesn’t that make me Catholic?’ ‘That’s lazy, sloppy abuse of language. My family has been farming for generations but that doesn’t define me as a farmer.
Active replicators have some effect on the world, which influences their chances of surviving.
My passion is based on evidence.
Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away.
It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.
To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.
Radiation all along the larger spectrum can be unwoven in the same kind of way as the rainbow, although the particular instrument we use for the unweaving – a radio tuner instead of a prism, for instance – is different in different parts of the spectrum.
But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn’t have any demonstrable standard to pervert.
Incidentally, I’m puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, thing didn’t burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did.
Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.