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.
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.
Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.
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.
Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.
Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’.
To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation.
Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be ‘civilised’ – or corrupted, depending on your point of view.
Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens.
Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad – a privileged source unavailable to atheists.
Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.
Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.