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Whatever The Evolutionary Basis Of Religion, The Xenophobia It Now Generates Is Clearly Maladaptive.

-Lawrence M. Krauss

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Whatever The Evolutionary Basis

Lawrence M. Krauss

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Whatever The Evolutionary Basis Of Religion, The Xenophobia It Now Generates Is Clearly Maladaptive.

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If Our Species Is To Survive, Our Future Will Probably Require Outposts Beyond Our Own Planet.

When A Person's Religious Beliefs Cause Him To Deny The Evidence Of Science, Or For Whom Public Policy Morphs Into A Battle With The Devil, Shouldn't That Be A Subject For Discussion And Debate?

We Should Provide The Meaning Of The Universe In The Meaning Of Our Own Lives. So I Think Science Doesn't Necessarily Have To Get In The Way Of Kind Of Spiritual Fulfillment.

Science Is Only Truly Consistent With An Atheistic Worldview With Regards To The Claimed Miracles Of The Gods Of Judaism, Christianity And Islam. Moreover, The True Believers In Each Of These Faiths Are Atheists Regarding The Specific Sacred Tenets Of All Other Faiths. Christianity Rejects The Proposition That The Quran Contains The Infallible Words Of The Creator Of The Universe. Muslims And Jews Reject The Divinity Of Jesus.

Now, Since The Time Of Newton There Had Been A Debate About Whether Light Was A Wave - That Is, A Traveling Disturbance In Some Background Medium - Or A Particle, Which Travels Regardless Of The Presence Of A Background Medium. The Observation Of Maxwell That Electromagnetic Waves Must Exist And That Their Speed Was Identical To That Of Light Ended The Debate: Light Was An Electromagnetic Wave.

The Universe Does Not Care What We Want.

In 5 Billion Years, The Expansion Of The Universe Will Have Progressed To The Point Where All Other Galaxies Will Have Receded Beyond Detection. Indeed, They Will Be Receding Faster Than The Speed Of Light, So Detection Will Be Impossible. Future Civilizations Will Discover Science And All Its Laws, And Never Know About Other Galaxies Or The Cosmic Background Radiation. They Will Inevitably Come To The Wrong Conclusion About The Universe......we Live In A Special Time, The Only Time, Where We Can Observationally Verify That We Live In A Special Time.

Keeping Religion Immune From Criticism Is Both Unwarranted And Dangerous.

The Amazing Thing Is That Every Atom In Your Body Came From A Star That Exploded.

Celebrate Our Brief Moment In The Sun

Without Science, Everything Is A Miracle.

The Ultimate Arbiter Of Truth Is Experiment, Not The Comfort One Derives From One's A Priori Beliefs, Nor The Beauty Or Elegance One Ascribes To One's Theoretical Models.

Every Atom In Your Body Came From A Star That Exploded. And The Atoms In Your Left Hand Probably Came From A Different Star Than Your Right Hand. It Really Is The Most Poetic Thing I Know About Physics: You Are All Stardust.

The Illusion Of Purpose And Design Is Perhaps The Most Pervasive Illusion About Nature That Science Has To Confront On A Daily Basis.

You Are All Stardust.

For, After All, In Science One Achieves The Greatest Impact (and Often The Greatest Headlines) Not By Going Along With The Herd, But By Bucking Against It.

Our Modern Conception Of The Universe Is So Foreign To What Even Scientists Generally Believed A Mere Century Ago That It Is A Tribute To The Power Of The Scientific Method And The Creativity And Persistence Of Humans Who Want To Understand It.

Scientific Method

Forget Jesus. The Stars Died So That You Could Be Here Today.

Empirical Explorations Ultimately Change Our Understanding Of Which Questions Are Important And Fruitful And Which Are Not.

A Significant Fraction Of Evangelical Voters Appear More Likely To Ignore The Candidates' Specific Economic And Foreign Policy Platforms In Favor Of Concerns About Gay Marriage Or Abortion.

If You Have Nothing In Quantum Mechanics, You Will Always Have Something.

Quantum Mechanics

The One Experience That I Hope Every Student Has At Some Point In Their Lives Is To Have Some Belief You Profoundly, Deeply Hold, Proved To Be Wrong Because That Is The Most Eye-opening Experience You Can Have, And As A Scientist, To Me, Is The Most Exciting Experience I Can Ever Have.

Philosophy Used To Be A Field That Had Content, But Then Natural Philosophy Became Physics, And Physics Has Only Continued To Make Inroads. Every Time Theres A Leap In Physics, It Encroaches On These Areas That Philosophers Have Carefully Sequestered Away To Themselves, And So Then You Have This Natural Resentment On The Part Of Philosophers.

My Area Of Research Is Something That In All Fairness Has No Practical Usability Whatsoever And The Thing Is I'm Often Asked To Apologize For That. It Is Interesting To Me That People Ask 'what's The Point Of Doing That If It's Not Useful?' But They Never Ask That, Or Do They Very Rarely Ask That About Art Or Literature Or Music. Those Things Are Not Gonna Produce A Better Toaster.

The Purpose Of Education Is Not To Validate Ignorance But To Overcome It.

Science Has Been Effective At Furthering Our Understanding Of Nature Because The Scientific Ethos Is Based On Three Key Principles: (1) Follow The Evidence Wherever It Leads; (2) If One Has A Theory, One Needs To Be Willing To Try To Prove It Wrong As Much As One Tries To Prove That It Is Right; (3) The Ultimate Arbiter Of Truth Is Experiment, Not The Comfort One Derives From One's A Priori Beliefs, Nor The Beauty Or Elegance One Ascribes To One's Theoretical Models.

Now, Almost One Hundred Years Later, It Is Difficult To Fully Appreciate How Much Our Picture Of The Universe Has Changed In The Span Of A Single Human Lifetime. As Far As The Scientific Community In 1917 Was Concerned, The Universe Was Static And Eternal, And Consisted Of A One Single Galaxy, Our Milky Way, Surrounded By Vast, Infinite, Dark, And Empty Space. This Is, After All, What You Would Guess By Looking Up At The Night Sky With Your Eyes, Or With A Small Telescope, And At The Time There Was Little Reason To Suspect Otherwise.

Science Is Not Just There For Technology. It's Part Of What Addressing Who You Are In The Universe And Understanding Your Place In The Cosmos. Good Art, Good Literature, Good Music - All Of That Is For That And Science Is A Part Of It.

People Are Interested In Science, But They Don't Always Know They're Interested In Science, And So I Try To Find A Way To Get Them Interested.

We Live At A Very Special Time . . . The Only Time When We Can Observationally Verify That We Live At A Very Special Time!

Whatever The Evolutionary Basis Of Religion, The Xenophobia It Now Generates Is Clearly Maladaptive.

In 5 Billion Years, The Expansion Of The Universe Will Have Progressed To The Point Where All Other Galaxies Will Have Receded Beyond Detection.

Teaching And Writing, To Me, Is Really Just Seduction; You Go To Where People Are And You Find Something That They're Interested In And You Try And Use That To Convince Them That They Should Be Interested In What You Have To Say.

A Truly Open Mind Means Forcing Our Imaginations To Conform To The Evidence Of Reality, And Not Vice Versa.

If We Wish To Draw Philosophical Conclusions About Our Own Existence, Our Significance, And The Significance Of The Universe Itself, Our Conclusions Should Be Based On Empirical Knowledge. A Truly Open Mind Means Forcing Our Imaginations To Conform To The Evidence Of Reality, And Not Vice Versa, Whether Or Not We Like The Implications.

Of Course, Supernatural Acts Are What Miracles Are All About. They Are, After All, Precisely Those Things That Circumvent The Laws Of Nature. A God Who Can Create The Laws Of Nature Can Presumably Also Circumvent Them At Will. Although Why They Would Have Been Circumvented So Liberally Thousands Of Years Ago, Before The Invention Of Modern Communication Instruments That Could Have Recorded Them, And Not Today, Is Still Something To Wonder About.

Lack Of Comfort Means We Are On The Threshold Of New Insights.

I Like To Say That While Antimatter May Seem Strange, It Is Strange In The Sense That Belgians Are Strange. They Are Not Really Strange; It Is Just That One Rarely Meets Them.

The Root Cause Of The Looming Energy Problem - And The Key To Easing Environmental, Economic And Religious Tensions While Improving Public Health - Is To Address The Unending, And Unequal, Growth Of The Human Population. And The One Proven Way To Reduce Fertility Rates Is To Empower Young Women By Educating Them.

Occam's Razor Suggests That, If Some Event Is Physically Plausible, We Don't Need Recourse To More Extraordinary Claims For Its Being. Surely The Requirement Of An All-powerful Deity Who Somehow Exists Outside Of Our Universe, Or Multiverse, While At The Same Time Governing What Goes On Inside It, Is One Such Claim. It Should Thus Be A Claim Of Last, Rather Than First, Resort.

The Universe Has A Much Greater Imagination Than We Do, Which Is Why The Real Story Of The Universe Is Far More Interesting Than Any Of The Fairy Tales We Have Invented To Describe It.

There Is A Maxim About The Universe Which I Always Tell My Students: That Which Is Not Explicitly Forbidden Is Guaranteed To Occur.

Discerning The Merits Of Competing Claims Is Where The Empirical Basis Of Science Should Play A Role. I Cannot Stress Often Enough That What Science Is All About Is Not Proving Things To Be True But Proving Them To Be False. What Fails The Test Of Empirical Reality, As Determined By Observation And Experiment, Gets Thrown Out Like Yesterday's Newspaper.

Metaphysical Speculation Is Independent Of The Physical Validity Of The Big Bang Itself And Is Irrelevant To Our Understanding Of It.

What Science Is All About Is A Process. It's Like Saying, "well, Is It Important For People To Know That World War Ii Happened?" Well It's Part Of What Makes Us Who We Are. And So, There's Basic Bits Of Science We Need To Know.

Organized Religion, Wielding Power Over The Community, Is Antithetical To The Process Of What Modern Democracy Should Define As Liberty. The Sooner We Are Without It, The Better.

I Cannot Stress Often Enough That What Science Is All About Is Not Proving Things To Be True But Proving Them To Be False.

Nothing Can Create Something All The Time Due To The Laws Of Quantum Mechanics, And It's - It's Fascinatingly Interesting.

As A Scientist, I Don't Believe Anything. Science Shouldn't Use The Word Belief. There Are Things More Likely And Less Likely. Science Can Say Nothing With Absolute Certainty.

The Universe Is The Way It Is , Whether We Like It Or Not. The Existence Or Nonexistence Of A Creator Is Independent Of Our Desires . A World Without God Or Purpose May Seem Harsh Or Pointless, But That Alone Doesn ' T Require God To Actually Exist.

The Real Thing That Physics Tell Us About The Universe Is That It's Big, Rare Event Happens All The Time — Including Life — And That Doesn't Mean It's Special.

Aside From Communications Satellites, Space Is Devoid Of Industry.

The Lack Of Understanding Of Something Is Not Evidence For God. It's Evidence Of A Lack Of Understanding.

It Really Is The Most Poetic Thing I Know About Physics: You Are All Stardust.

You Shouldn't Be Afraid Of Science. Accepting The Reality Of Nature Makes Life More Exciting And Even More Precious.

For The Record: Quantum Mechanics Does Not Deny The Existence Of Objective Reality. Nor Does It Imply That Mere Thoughts Can Change External Events. Effects Still Require Causes, So If You Want To Change The Universe, You Need To Act On It.

In This Sense, Science, As Physicist Steven Weinberg Has Emphasized, Does Not Make It Impossible To Believe In God, But Rather Makes It Possible To Not Believe In God.

We Now Know That We Are More Insignificant Than We Ever Imagined. If You Get Rid Of Everything We See, The Universe Is Essentially The Same. We Constitute A 1 Percent Bit Of Pollution In A Universe . . . We Are Completely Irrelevant.

What People Believe Impacts On What They Do. And It's Not As If Religion Is Universally Bad. Of Course It's Responsible For Many Peoples Doing Good Actions.

It Is A Shame When Nonsense Can Substitute For Fact With Impunity.

[the Writers Of The Holy Books] Did Not Even Know The Earth Revolves Around The Sun. Why Are We Listening?

The Fact Is That People Would Rather Cling When They're Afraid Of Something To A Priori Beliefs Than Rather Open Their Minds About It.

The Universe Is The Way It Is, Whether We Like It Or Not.

Religious Leaders Need To Be Held Accountable For Their Ideas.

I Hope That Every [person] At One Point In Their Life Has The Opportunity To Have Something That Is At The Heart Of Their Being, Something So Central To Their Being That If They Lose It They Won't Feel They're Human Anymore, To Be Proved Wrong Because That's The Liberation That Science Provides. The Realization That To Assume The Truth, To Assume The Answer Before You Ask The Questions Leads You Nowhere.

Most People Don't Base Their Morality On Religion In Spite What They Say. If You Ask People, "if You Didn't Believe In God, Would You Go Out And Kill Your Neighbour?" Most People Will Say, "no".

Science Is Only Truly Consistent With An Atheistic Worldview With Regards To The Claimed Miracles Of The Gods Of Judaism, Christianity And Islam.

You Couldn't Be Here If Stars Hadn't Exploded, Because The Elements - The Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Iron, All The Things That Matter For Evolution - Weren't Created At The Beginning Of Time. They Were Created In The Nuclear Furnaces Of Stars, And The Only Way They Could Get Into Your Body Is If The Stars Were Kind Enough To Explode. So, Forget Jesus. The Stars Died So That You Could Be Here Today.

The Ultimate Goal Of Physicists Is To Arrive At An Equation That Explains Everything And Could Fit On A T-shirt. That May Happen But The T-shirt Would Have To Be 10-dimensional.

A Universe Without Purpose Should Neither Depress Us Nor Suggest That Our Lives Are Purposeless. Through An Awe-inspiring Cosmic History We Find Ourselves On This Remote Planet In A Remote Corner Of The Universe, Endowed With Intelligence And Self-awareness. We Should Not Despair, But Should Humbly Rejoice In Making The Most Of These Gifts, And Celebrate Our Brief Moment In The Sun.

Empty Space Is A Boiling, Bubbling Brew Of Virtual Particles That Pop In And Out Of Existence In A Time Scale So Short That You Can't Even Measure Them.

For Many, To Live In A Universe That May Have No Purpose, And No Creator, Is Unthinkable.

The Really Important Thing Is Learning How To Sceptically Question And Rely On Empirical Evidence.

Empirical Evidence

There Are A Lot Of Legislators Who Are Afraid That Kids Will Learn Science And Lose Their Faith.

90% Of The Mass In Your Body Comes From Empty Space.

We All Trust Each Other To Some Extent. We Have To Rely On Experts To Some Extent, But We Should Learn To Be Sceptical.

I Can't Prove That God Doesn't Exist, But I'd Much Rather Live In A Universe Without One.

At The Heart Of Quantum Mechanics Is A Rule That Sometimes Governs Politicians Or Ceos-as Long As No One Is Watching, Anything Goes.

Neutrinos Alone, Among All The Known Particles, Have Ethereal Properties That Are Striking And Romantic Enough Both To Have Inspired A Poem By John Updike And To Have Sent Teams Of Scientists Deep Underground For 50 Years To Build Huge Science-fiction-like Contraptions To Unravel Their Mysteries.

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