Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn’t need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.
This doesn’t mean, as I shall continue to argue, that there is a total dearth of reasons or rhymes in evolutionary history. I believe there are recurring patterns. I also believe, though this is more controversial today than it once was, that there are senses in which evolution may be said to be directional, progressive and even predictable. But progress is emphatically not the same thing as progress towards humanity, and we must live with a weak and unflattering sense of the predictable.
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Always devise your rules as if you didn’t know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.
My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast.
Far better, of course, would be to abandon the promotion of religion altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that could fairly be described as obscene.
We can’t prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.
Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.
Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.
Paul Davies’s The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism – for.
Functionally speaking, too, genes are gregarious. They have phenotypic effects on bodies, but they do not do so in isolation. I stress this over and over again in this book.
The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.
I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t. Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception.
Hitler no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century technology at his disposal.
Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx.
Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained or Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not.
Selection favours those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes, which in turn succeed in the presence of them.
A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and – according to recent experimental evidence – may even be capable of learning a form of human language.