Background Image

...

Barring A Theoretical Resolution, Which I Think Is Unlikely, You Either Have To Say There Are Zillions Of Parallel Universes Out There That We Can't Observe At Present Or You Have To Say There Was A Plan. I Actually Find The Argument Of The Existence Of A God Who Did The Planning More Compelling Than The Bubbling Of All These Multiverses.

-Richard Dawkins

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Barring A Theoretical Resolution,

Richard Dawkins

...

Barring A Theoretical Resolution, Which I Think Is Unlikely, You Either Have To Say There Are Zillions Of Parallel Universes Out There That We Can't Observe At Present Or You Have To Say There Was A Plan. I Actually Find The Argument Of The Existence Of A God Who Did The Planning More Compelling Than The Bubbling Of All These Multiverses.

Views: 9

Topic

More From Richard Dawkins

There Is Something Infantile In The Presumption That Somebody Else Has A Responsibility To Give Your Life Meaning And Point… The Truly Adult View, By Contrast, Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It.

Evolution Is Fundamentally Hostile To Religion.

I Don't Know What To Think About Magic And Fairy Tales.

Religions Do Make Claims About The Universe--the Same Kinds Of Claims That Scientists Make, Except They're Usually False.

The Theory Of Evolution By Cumulative Natural Selection Is The Only Theory We Know Of That Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining The Existence Of Organized Complexity.

Theory Of Evolution

Let's Get Up Off Our Knees, Stop Cringing Before Bogeymen And Virtual Fathers, Face Reality, And Help Science To Do Something Constructive About Human Suffering.

We Cannot Prove That There Is No God, But We Can Safely Conclude The He Is Very, Very Improbable Indeed.

There Is No God

The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain.

We Have This One Life, Let's Enjoy It, Let's Live It To The Full And Don't Get So Worked Up About Don't Identify Yourself So Passionately With This Business Called Religion.

Again, It Is Belief Without Evidence. In The Case Of Stalinism, People Actually Distorted Science, Because It Was For The Good Of The Communist Party.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries, We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Can't See The Extraordinary Beauty Of The Idea That Life Started From Nothing - That Is Such A Staggering, Elegant, Beautiful Thing, Why Would You Want To Clutter It Up With Something So Messy As A God?

Extraordinary Beauty

Jesus Was Not Content To Derive His Ethics From The Scriptures Of His Upbringing. He Explicitly Departed From Them. [...] Since A Principal Thesis Of This Chapter Is That We Do Not, And Should Not, Derive Our Morals From Scripture, Jesus Has To Be Honoured As A Model For That Very Thesis.

When We Talk About Genes For Anything, Like A Gene For Being Gay Or A Gene For Being Aggressive Or Something Of That Sort, That A Gene For Anything May Not Have Been A Gene For That Thing Under Different Environmental Conditions.

I Mean I Think That When You've Got A Big Brain, When You Find Yourself Planted In A World With A Brain Big Enough To Understand Quite A Lot Of What You See Around You, But Not Everything, You Naturally Fall To Thinking About The Deep Mysteries. Where Do We Come From? Where Does The World Come From? Where Does The Universe Come From?

Biology Is The Study Of Complicated Things That Give The Appearance Of Having Been Designed For A Purpose

Show Me A Cultural Relativist At 30,000 Feet And I'll Show You A Hypocrite ... If You Are Flying To An International Congress Of Anthropologists Or Literary Critics, The Reason You Will Probably Get There - The Reason You Don't Plummet Into A Ploughed Field - Is That A Lot Of Western Scientifically Trained Engineers Have Got Their Sum Right.

The Resemblance Of The Signs Of The Zodiac To The Animals After Which They Are Named... Is As Unimpressive As The Predictions Of Astrologers.

There Are People In The World Who Desperately Want Not To Have To Believe In Darwinism .

I Read In The Paper Today The List Of The Most Popular Boys' Names In Britain. The First Was Jack, The Second Was Mohammed. That Makes Me Feel A Little Bit Worried.

You Could Give Aristotle A Tutorial. And You Could Thrill Him To The Core Of His Being. Aristotle Was An Encyclopedic Polymath, An All Time Intellect. Yet Not Only Can You Know More Than Him About The World, You Also Can Have A Deeper Understanding Of How Everything Works. Such Is The Privilege Of Living After Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick And Their Colleagues.

Hence, At The Moment Of The Creation Of The Universe, God Could Also Have Activated Evolution, With Full Knowledge Of How It Would Turn Out, Perhaps Even Including Our Having This Conversation. The Idea That He Could Both Foresee The Future And Also Give Us Spirit And Free Will To Carry Out Our Own Desires Becomes Entirely Acceptable.

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

To Illustrate The Vain Conceit That The Universe Must Be Somehow Pre-ordained For Us, Because We Are So Well-suited To Live In It, He [douglas Adams] Mimed A Wonderfully Funny Imitation Of A Puddle Of Water, Fitting Itself Snugly Into A Depression In The Ground, The Depression Uncannily Being Exactly The Same Shape As The Puddle.

My God Is Not Improbable To Me. He Has No Need Of A Creation Story For Himself Or To Be Fine-tuned By Something Else.

The Word 'mundane' Has Come To Mean 'boring' And 'dull', And It Really Shouldn't - It Should Mean The Opposite. Because It Comes From The Latin Mundus, Meaning 'the World'. And The World Is Anything But Dull: The World Is Wonderful. There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

The Human Psyche Has Two Great Sicknesses: The Urge To Carry Vendetta Across Generations, And The Tendency To Fasten Group Labels On People Rather Than See Them As Individuals. Abrahamic Religion Gives Strong Sanction To Both-and Mixes Explosively With Both. Only The Willfully Blind Could Fail To Implicate The Divisive Force Of Religion In Most, If Not All, Of The Violent Enmities In The World Today.

Evolution Is A Fact, As Securely Established As Any In Science, And He Who Denies It Betrays Woeful Ignorance And Lack Of Education, Which Likely Extends To Other Fields As Well.

There Does Seem To Be A Sense In Which Physics Has Gone Beyond What Human Intuition Can Understand. We Shouldn't Be Too Surprised About That Because We're Evolved To Understand Things That Move At A Medium Pace At A Medium Scale. We Can't Cope With The Very Tiny Scale Of Quantum Physics Or The Very Large Scale Of Relativity.

I Really, Really Would Like To See Religion Go Away Altogether.

Science Replaces Private Prejudice With Public, Verifiable Evidence.

My Untidy Habits Drive Me To Follow The Slash-and-burn Principle. Work On A Virgin Table Until The Mess Becomes Unbearable, Then Move On To A Clean Table In A Clean Room - Or, On A Beautiful Summer Day Like This, One Of The Five Tables Dotted Around The Garden. Trash That Table And Move On Again.

Certainly I See The Scientific View Of The World As Incompatible With Religion, But That Is Not What Is Interesting About It. It Is Also Incompatible With Magic, But That Also Is Not Worth Stressing. What Is Interesting About The Scientific World View Is That It Is True, Inspiring, Remarkable And That It Unites A Whole Lot Of Phenomena Under A Single Heading.

The Enlightenment Is Under Threat. So Is Reason. So Is Truth. So Is Science, Especially In The Schools Of America.

To Describe Religions As Mind Viruses Is Sometimes Interpreted As Contemptuous Or Even Hostile. It Is Both. I Am Often Asked Why I Am So Hostile To Organized Religion.

It Could Be Any Of A Billion Gods. It Could Be God Of The Martians Or Of The Inhabitants Of Alpha Centauri. The Chance Of Its Being A Particular God, Yahweh, The God Of Jesus, Is Vanishingly Small - At The Least, The Onus Is On You To Demonstrate Why You Think That's The Case.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life.

There Is A Popular Cliché ... Which Says That You Cannot Get Out Of Computers Any More Than You Have Put In..., That Computers Can Only Do Exactly What You Tell Them To, And That Therefore Computers Are Never Creative. This Cliché Is True Only In A Crashingly Trivial Sense, The Same Sense In Which Shakespeare Never Wrote Anything Except What His First Schoolteacher Taught Him To Write-words.

The Time Has Come For People Of Reason To Say: Enough Is Enough! Religious Faith Discourages Independent Thought, It's Divisive And It's Dangerous.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

Atheists Sometimes Come Across As A Bit Arrogant In This Regard, And Characterizing Faith As Something Only An Idiot Would Attach Themselves To.

To Invoke The Origin Of The Dna/protein Machine By Invoking A Supernatural Designer Is To Explain Precisely Nothing - For It Leaves Unexplained The Origin Of The Designer.

Evolution Is Just A Theory? Well, So Is Gravity And I Don't See You Jumping Out Of Buildings.

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Thought Provoking

A God Who Is Capable Of Sending Intelligible Signals To Millions Of People Simultaneously, And Of Receiving Messages From All Of Them Simultaneously, Cannot Be, Whatever Else He Might Be, Simple. Such Bandwidth!

It Is Possible In Medicine, Even When You Intend To Do Good, To Do Harm Instead. That Is Why Science Thrives On Actively Encouraging Criticism Rather Than Stifling It.

Don't Ask God To Cure Cancer And World Poverty. He's Too Busy Finding You A Parking Space And Fixing The Weather For Your Barbecue.

It's Known That Stress Gives Rise To Disease. It's Also Known That Many Diseases, Especially Stress-related Diseases, Can Be Cured By Placebos - Pills That Have No Medicinal Effect, But People Think They Do, And So They Do.

Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

Atheists Are The New Gays; In The Closet And Pretty Much Disqualified From Public Office.

A Delusion That Encourages Belief Where There Is No Evidence Is Asking For Trouble. Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle. Instead, Disagreements Are Settled By Other Means Which, In Extreme Cases, Inevitably Become Violent. Scientists Disagree Among Themselves But They Never Fight Over Their Disagreements. They Argue About Evidence Or Go Out And Seek New Evidence. Much The Same Is True Of Philosophers, Historians And Literary Critics.

Intelligent Life On A Planet Comes Of Age When It First Works Out The Reason For Its Own Existence.

...there Are No Natural Borderlines In Evolution. The Illusion Of A Borderline Is Created By The Fact That The Evolutionary Intermediates Happen To Be Extinct.

Religion Shows A Pattern Of Heredity Which I Think Is Similar To Genetic Heredity. ... There Are Hundreds Of Different Religious Sects, And Every Religious Person Is Loyal To Just One Of These. ... The Overwhelming Majority Just Happen To Choose The One Their Parents Belonged To. Not The Sect That Has The Best Evidence In Its Favour, The Best Miracles, The Best Moral Code, The Best Cathedral, The Best Stained-glass, The Best Music When It Comes To Choosing From The Smorgasbord Of Available Religions, Their Potential Virtues Seem To Count For Nothing Compared To The Matter Of Heredity.

Do Humans Have A Different Moral Significance Than Cows In General?

Faith Is Powerful Enough To Immunize People Against All Appeals To Pity, To Forgiveness, To Decent Human Feelings. It Even Immunizes Them Against Fear, If They Honestly Believe That A Martyr's Death Will Send Them Straight To Heaven.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

With So Many Mind-bytes To Be Downloaded, So Many Mental Codons To Be Replicated, It Is No Wonder That Child Brains Are Gullible, Open To Almost Any Suggestion, Vulnerable To Subversion, Easy Prey To Moonies, Scientologists And Nuns. Like Immune-deficient Patients, Children Are Wide Open To Mental Infections That Adults Might Brush Off Without Effort.

I Am Trying To Call Attention To The Elephant In The Room That Everybody Is Too Polite - Or Too Devout - To Notice: Religion, And Specifically The Devaluing Effect That Religion Has On Human Life.

Sometimes I Think It's Possible To Mistake Desire For Clarity And Talking In A No-nonsense Way For Aggression.

The Idea Of Tiny Changes Cumulated Over Many Steps Is An Immensely Powerful Idea, Capable Of Explaining An Enormous Range Of Things That Would Be Otherwise Inexplicable.

I Need To Learn Not To Bend Over Backwards To Be Nice To Faith-heads. Give These People An Inch And They Take A League. I Think, As I Did When I Wrote The God Delusion, That The Roman Catholic Church Is A Disgusting Institution, The Second Most Evil Religion In The World.

On One Planet [earth], And Possibly Only One Planet In The Entire Universe, Molecules That Would Normally Make Nothing More Complicated Than A Chunk Of Rock, Gather Themselves Together Into Chunks Of Rock-sized Matter Of Such Staggering Complexity That They Are Capable Of Running, Jumping, Swimming, Flying, Seeing, Hearing, Capturing And Eating Other Such Animated Chunks Of Complexity; Capable In Some Cases Of Thinking And Feeling, And Falling In Love With Yet Other Chunks Of Complex Matter.

Falling In Love

Isn't It A Remarkable Coincidence Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents ? And It Always Just Happens To Be The Right Religion. Religions Run In Families. If We'd Been Brought Up In Ancient Greece We Would All Be Worshiping Zeus And Apollo. If We Had Been Born Vikings We Would Be Worshiping Wotan And Thor. How Does This Come About ? Through Childhood Indoctrination.

Metaphors Are Fine If They Aid Understanding, But Sometimes They Get In The Way.

I Just Would Like To Say That Over More Than A Quarter-century As A Scientist And A Believer, I Find Absolutely Nothing In Conflict Between Agreeing With Richard [dawkins] In Practically All Of His Conclusions About The Natural World, And Also Saying That I Am Still Able To Accept And Embrace The Possibility That There Are Answers That Science Isn't Able To Provide About The Natural World - The Questions About Why Instead Of The Questions About How. I'm Interested In The Whys.

Blindness To Suffering Is An Inherent Consequence Of Natural Selection. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

My Last Vestige Of 'hands Off Religion' Respect Disappeared In The Smoke And Choking Dust Of September 11, 2001, Followed By The 'national Day Of Prayer,' When Prelates And Pastors Did Their Tremulous Martin Luther King Impersonations And Urged People Of Mutually Incompatible Faiths To Hold Hands, United In Homage To The Very Force That Caused The Problem In The First Place.

There Could Be Something Incredibly Grand And Incomprehensible And Beyond Our Present Understanding.

Aquarius Is A Miscellaneous Set Of Stars All At Different Distances From Us, Which Have No Connection With Each Other Except That They Constitute A (meaningless) Pattern When Seen From A Certain (not Particularly Special) Place In The Galaxy (here).

There Isn't [in New Atheism]. Nothing That Wasn't In Bertrand Russell Or Probably Robert Ingersoll. But I Suppose It Is More Of A Political Effect, In That All These Books Happened To Come Out At The Same Time. I Like To Think That We Have Some Influence.

There Is Economics In Biology, Nothing Is Free, Everything Has To Be Paid For, There Are Costs As Well As Benefits To Everything In Life, For Example, There Was Never Sufficient Natural Selection Pressure To Develop Better Eyes, Individuals Could Earn Other Things Like Smiley Smiles Rather Than Waste Energy & Time On Better Eyes.

Race Does Not Come Into It. It Is Pure Religion And Culture. Something About The Cultural Tradition Of Jews Is Way, Way More Sympathetic To Science And Learning And Intellectual Pursuits Than Islam. That Would Have Been A Fair Comparison.

I Think The World's Always A Better Place If People Are Filled With Understanding.

God Is The Answer To All Of Those "how Must It Have Come To Be" Questions.

Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

I Doubt That Religion Can Survive Deep Understanding. The Shallows Are Its Natural Habitat. Cranks And Fundamentalists Are Too Often Victimised As Scapegoats For Religion In General. It Is Only Quite Recently That Christianity Reinvented Itself In Non-fundamentalist Guise, And Islam Has Yet To Do So.

Deep Understanding

So Occam's Razor - Occam Says You Should Choose The Explanation That Is Most Simple And Straightforward - Leads Me More To Believe In God Than In The Multiverse, Which Seems Quite A Stretch Of The Imagination.

If A Healing Technique Is Demonstrated To Have Curative Properties In Properly Controlled Double-blind Trials, It Ceases To Be Alternative. It Simply, As Diamond Explains, Becomes Medicine.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die, Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Number Of People Who Could Be Here, In My Place, Out Number The Sand Grains In The Sahara. If You Think About All The Different Ways In Which Our Genes Could Be Permuted, You And I Are Quite Grotesquely Lucky To Be Here. The Number Of Events That Had To Happen In Order For You To Exist, In Order For Me To Exist... We Are Privileged To Be Alive And Nd We Should Make The Most Of Our Time On This World.

To Be Fair, Much Of The Bible Is Not Systematically Evil But Just Plain Weird, As You Would Expect Of A Chaotically Cobbled-together Anthology Of Disjointed Documents, Composed, Revised, Translated, Distorted And 'improved' By Hundreds Of Anonymous Authors, Editors And Copyists, Unknown To Us And Mostly Unknown To Each Other, Spanning Nine Centuries

I Mean It As A Compliment When I Say That You Could Almost Define A Philosopher As Someone Who Won't Take Common Sense For An Answer.

[richard Leakey Is] A Robust Hero Of A Man, Who Actually Lives Up To The Cliché, “a Big Man In Every Sense Of The Word.” Like Other Big Men He Is Loved By Many, Feared By Some, And Not Over-preoccupied With The Judgments Of Any.

If Bush And Blair Are Eventually Put On Trial For War Crimes, I Shall Not Be Among Those Pressing For Them To Be Hanged.

I'm Quite A Softy, Yes. I Have A Blank Spot With Respect To Visual Art, But I Have Perhaps A Compensating Hypersensitivity To Poetry And Music.

Poetry And Music

It Would Be Intolerant If I Advocated The Banning Of Religion, But Of Course I Never Have.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

Religion Has Been A Powerful Weapon In The Hands Of Governments, In The Hands Of Priests, In The Hands Of Kings Who Have Used It As A Weapon To Keep Down The Populace. It Is A Wonderful Way Of Disciplining People And Making Them Do What You Want, To Tell Them That If They Don't Do What You Want They Will, For Example, Go To Hell.

The Universe Doesn't Owe Us Condolence Or Consolation; It Doesn't Owe Us A Nice Warm Feeling Inside.

Let Our Tribute To The Dead Be A New Resolve: To Respect People For What They Individually Think, Rather Than Respect Groups For What They Were Collectively Brought Up To Believe.

'take Offense At The Drop Of A Hat' Is The Unwritten Eleventh Commandment.

What Is The Purpose Of The Universe?" Is A Silly Question.

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority.

Sometimes In Life It Is A Good Idea To Stop,sometimes It Is A Good Idea To Go On. The Trick Is To Decide When To Stop

Bush And Bin Laden Are Really On The Same Side: The Side Of Faith And Violence Against The Side Of Reason And Discussion. Both Have Implacable Faith That They Are Right And The Other Is Evil. Each Believes That When He Dies He Is Going To Heaven. Each Believes That If He Could Kill The Other, His Path To Paradise In The Next World Would Be Even Swifter. The Delusional "next World" Is Welcome To Both Of Them. This World Would Be A Much Better Place Without Either Of Them.

It Is A Virtue To Admit Ignorance When You Don't Know, But Not To Wallow In Ignorance As An End In Itself. People Say If We Don't Believe God Is Watching Over Us, We Abandon Morality. Are They Right?

I Personally Would Go Further And Say That, If Your Morality Is Based, As Mine Is, On A Desire To Increase The Sum Of Happiness And Reduce Suffering, The Decision To Deliberately Give Birth To A Down Baby, When You Have The Choice To Abort It Early In The Pregnancy, Might Actually Be Immoral From The Point Of View Of The Child’s Own Welfare.

Having A Debate With A Modern Christian Is Like Punching A Sponge.

Ironically, I Originally Wrote The Tweet With Jews And Thought, That Might Give Offense. And So I Thought I Better Change It.

What Has 'theology' Ever Said That Is Of The Smallest Use To Anybody? When Has 'theology' Ever Said Anything That Is Demonstrably True And Is Not Obvious? What Makes You Think That 'theology' Is A Subject At All?

I Have Found It An Amusing Strategy, When Asked Whether I Am An Atheist, To Point Out That The Questioner Is Also An Atheist When Considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, The Golden Calf And The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I Just Go One God Further.

The Patient Typically Finds Himself Impelled By Some Deep, Inner Conviction That Something Is True, Or Right, Or Virtuous: A Conviction That Doesn't Seem To Owe Anything To Evidence Or Reason, But Which, Nevertheless, He Feels As Totally Compelling And Convincing. We Doctors Refer To Such A Belief As 'faith'.

Why Do More Than 40 Percent Of Americans Think That The Universe Began After The Domestication Of The Dog?

Such Is The Breathtaking Speciesism Of Our Christian-inspired Attitudes, The Abortion Of A Single Human Zygote Can Arouse More Moral Solicitude And Righteous Indignation Than The Vivasection Of Any Number Of Intelligent Adult Chimpanzees! The Only Reason We Can Be Comfortable With Such A Double Standard Is That The Intermediates Between Humans And Chimps Are All Dead.

Theologians Will Protest That The Story Of Abraham Sacrificing Issac Should Not Be Taken As Literal Fact. And The Appropriate Response Is Twofold: First, Many, Many People Even To This Day, Do Take The Whole Of Their Scripture To Be Literal Fact, And They Have A Great Deal Of Political Power Over The Rest Of Us, Especially In The United States And In The Islamic World. Second, If Not Of Literal Fact, How Should We Take The Story? As An Alagory? Then An Alagory For What? Surely, Nothing Praiseworthy. As A Moral Lesson? But What Kind Of Morals Could One Derive From This Appalling Story?

The God Of The Old Testament Is Arguably The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction: Jealous And Proud Of It; A Petty, Unjust, Unforgiving Control-freak; A Vindictive, Bloodthirsty Ethnic Cleanser; A Misogynistic, Homophobic, Racist, Infanticidal, Genocidal, Filicidal, Pestilential, Megalomaniacal, Sadomasochistic, Capriciously Malevolent Bully.

Faith Can Be Very Very Dangerous, And Deliberately To Implant It Into The Vulnerable Mind Of An Innocent Child Is A Grievous Wrong.

At The Deepest Level, All Living Things That Have Ever Been Looked At Have The Same Dna Code. And Many Of The Same Genes.

No Matter How Much Knowledge And Wisdom You Acquire During Your Life, Not One Jot Will Be Passed On To Your Children By Genetic Means. Each New Generation Starts From Scratch.

Evolution Is A Theory In A Special Philosophical Sense Of Science, But In Terms Of Ordinary Laymen's Use Of Language, It's A Fact, .. Evolution Is A Fact In The Same Sense That It's A Fact That The Earth Is Round And Not Flat, [that] The Earth Goes Round The Sun. Both Those Are Also Theories, But They're Theories That Have Never Been Disproved And Never Will Be Disproved.

The Important Thing To Remember About Mathematics Is Not To Be Frightened

Physicists Have Come Up With Other Explanations. One Is To Say That These Six Constants Are Not Free To Vary. Some Unified Theory Will Eventually Show That They Are As Locked In As The Circumference And The Diameter Of A Circle. That Reduces The Odds Of Them All Independently Just Happening To Fit The Bill.

I Think Douglas [adams] Is Writing With An Eye To Irony For Adults At The Same Time As Entertaining Children.

My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

From My Perspective, God Cannot Be Completely Contained Within Nature, And Therefore God's Existence Is Outside Of Science's Ability To Really Weigh In.

Those Who Wish To Base Their Morality Literally On The Bible Have Either Not Read It Or Not Understood It.

We Humans Are An Extremely Important Manifestation Of The Replication Bomb, Because It Is Through Us - Through Our Brains, Our Symbolic Culture And Our Technology - That The Explosion May Proceed To The Next Stage And Reverberate Through Deep Space.

[alternative Medicine Is Defined As] That Set Of Practices That Cannot Be Tested, Refuse To Be Tested Or Consistently Fail Tests.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

Human Psychology Has A Near Universal Tendency To Let Belief Be Coloured By Desire.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

God Exists, If Only In The Form Of A Meme With High Survival Value, Or Infective Power, In The Environment Provided By Human Culture.

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think.

What Has Happened Is That Genetics Has Become A Branch Of Information Technology. It Is Pure Information. It's Digital Information. It's Precisely The Kind Of Information That Can Be Translated Digit For Digit, Byte For Byte, Into Any Other Kind Of Information And Then Translated Back Again. This Is A Major Revolution. I Suppose It's Probably "the" Major Revolution In The Whole History Of Our Understanding Of Ourselves. It's Something Would Have Boggled The Mind Of Darwin, And Darwin Would Have Loved It, I'm Absolutely Sure.

I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realize That We Are Apes.

If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

Time And Again, My Sociobiological Colleagues Have Upbraided Me As A Turncoat, Because I Will Not Agree With Them That The Ultimate Criterion For The Success Of A Meme Must Be Its Contribution To Darwinian "fitness". At Bottom, They Insist, A "good Meme" Spreads Because Brains Are Receptive To It, And The Receptiveness Of Brains Is Ultimately Shaped By (genetic) Natural Selection.

The Physicist's Problem Is The Problem Of Ultimate Origins And Ultimate Natural Laws. The Biologist's Problem Is The Problem Of Complexity.

Natural Selection Is All About The Differential Success Of Rival Dna In Getting Itself Transmitted Vertically In The Species Archives.

I Am An Enthusiastic Darwinian, But I Think Darwinism Is Too Big A Theory To Be Confined To The Narrow Context Of The Gene.

If It Is Solely An Evolutionary Convenience, There Is Really No Such Thing As Good Or Evil.

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

Book Critics Or Theatre Critics Can Be Derisively Negative And Gain Delighted Praise For The Trenchant With Of Their Review. But In Criticisms Of Religion Even Clarity Ceases To Be A Virtue And Sounds Like Aggressive Hostility. A Politician May Attack An Opponent Scathingly Across The Floor Of The House And Earn Plaudits For His Robust Pugnacity. But Let A Soberly Reasoning Critic Of Religion Employ What Would In Other Contexts Sound Merely Direct Or Forthright, And It Will Be Described As A 'rant'.

I Think The Written Word Is Probably The Best Medium Of Communication Because You Have Time To Reflect, You Have Time To Choose Your Words, To Get Your Sentences Exactly Right. Whereas When You're Being Interviewed, Say, You Have To Talk On The Fly, You Have To Improvise, You Can Change Sentences Around, And They're Not Exactly Right.

Gravity Is Not A Version Of The Truth. It Is The Truth. Anyone Who Doubts It Is Invited To Jump Out A Tenth-storey Window.

I Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

With Respect To Those Meanings Of 'human' That Are Relevant To The Morality Of Abortion, Any Fetus Is Less Human Than An Adult Pig.

There's No Point Of Having Faith If You Have Evidence.

American Political Opportunities Are Loaded Against Those Who Are Simultaneously Intelligent And Honest.

I Can Remember At The Age Of About Six Being Fascinated By The Planets And Learning All About Mars And Venus And Things.

‎"matter Flows From Place To Place, And Momentarily Comes Together To Be You. Some People Find That Thought Disturbing; I Find The Reality Thrilling.

The Feeling Of Awed Wonder That Science Can Give Us Is One Of The Highest Experiences Of Which The Human Psyche Is Capable.

There Is Something Wrong With Using Faith - Belief Without Evidence - As A Political Weapon. I Wouldn't Say There Is Something Similar About Using Science. Science - Or The Products Of Science Like Technology - Is Just A Way Of Achieving Something Real, Something That Happens, Something That Works.

That There Is A Continuous Link From Humans To Gorillas, With The Intermediate Species Merely Long Dead, Is Beyond The Understanding Of Speciesists. Tie The Label Homo Sapiens Even To A Tiny Piece Of Insensible Embryonic Tissue, And Its Life Suddenly Leaps To Infinite, Incomputable Value.... Self-styled Pro-lifers, And Others That Indulge In Footling Debates About Exactly When In Its Development A Foetus Becomes Human, Exhibit The Same Discontinuous Mentality. Human, To The Discontinuous Mind, Is An Absolutist Concept. There Can Be No Half Measures. And From This Flows Much Evil.

There Is An Anaesthetic Of Familiarity, A Sedative Of Ordinariness Which Dulls The Senses And Hides The Wonder Of Existence. For Those Of Us Not Gifted In Poetry, It Is At Least Worth While From Time To Time Making An Effort To Shake Off The Anaesthetic. What Is The Best Way Of Countering The Sluggish Habitutation Brought About By Our Gradual Crawl From Babyhood? We Can't Actually Fly To Another Planet. But We Can Recapture That Sense Of Having Just Tumbled Out To Life On A New World By Looking At Our Own World In Unfamiliar Ways.

Suppose That There's A Gene That Makes You Gay If You Were Bottle-fed But That Has Some Completely Different Effect If You Were Breast-fed. So In The Days Before Bottles Were Invented That Gene Would Not Have Manifested Itself As Gay Behavior, But Now That Bottles Are Common It Can Do So.

Even If It Were True That Evolution, Or The Teaching Of Evolution, Encouraged Immorality That Would Not Imply That The Theory Of Evolution Was False.

Theory Of Evolution

…the Genesis Story Is Just One That Happened To Have Been Adopted By One Particular Tribe Of Middle Eastern Herders. It Has No More Special Status Than The Belief Of A Particular West African Tribe That The World Was Created From The Excrement Of Ants.

A Child Is Not A Christian Child, Not A Muslim Child, But A Child Of Christian Parents Or A Child Of Muslim Parents. This Latter Nomenclature, By The Way, Would Be An Excellent Piece Of Consciousness-raising For The Children Themselves. A Child Who Is Told She Is A 'child Of Muslim Parents' Will Immediately Realize That Religion Is Something For Her To Choose -or Reject- When She Becomes Old Enough To Do So.

Creationists And Holocaust Deniers Are Both Very Similar - Both Are Denying What Is A Perfectly Manifest Fact. In The Case Of Holocaust Deniers It's More Recent History, But In Both Cases The Evidence - In Favour Of The Holocaust And Evolution - Is Simply Overwhelming. That Doesn't Mean They Are Morally Or Politically Equivalent. But They Are Equivalent In Denying History.

We Are Survival Machines – Robot Vehicles Blindly Programmed To Preserve The Selfish Molecules Known As Genes. This Is A Truth Which Still Fills Me With Astonishment.

I Once Wrote That Anybody Who Believes The World Is Only 6,000 Years Old Is Either Ignorant, Stupid, Insane Or Wicked.

We Think We Know That Chimpanzees Are Higher Animals And Earthworms Are Lower, We Think We've Always Known What That Means, And We Think Evolution Makes It Even Clearer. But It Doesn't. It Is By No Means Clear That It Means Anything At All. Or If It Means Anything, It Means So Many Different Things To Be Misleading, Even Pernicious.

You Can't Imagine How Gratifying It Is To Have A Reader Come Up To You And Say, 'you Changed My Life.'

Science Has Eradicated Smallpox, Can Immunise Against Most Previously Deadly Viruses, Can Kill Most Previously Deadly Bacteria. Theology Has Done Nothing But Talk Of Pestilence As The Wages Of Sin.

Of Course In Science There Are Things That Are Open To Doubt And Things Need To Be Discussed. But Among The Things That Science Does Know, Evolution Is About As Certain As Anything We Know.

God Is An Idea That People Believe In And I Spend Time Arguing With People That Subscribe To That Idea(man Made Idea).

I Am Thrilled To Be Alive At Time When Humanity Is Pushing Against The Limits Of Understanding. Even Better, We May Eventually Discover That There Are No Limits.

Some Sort Of Belief In All-powerful Supernatural Beings Is Common, If Not Universal. A Tendency To Obey Authority, Perhaps Especially In Children, A Tendency To Believe What You're Told, A Tendency To Fear Your Own Death, A Tendency To Wish To See Your Loved Ones Who Have Died, To Wish To See Them Again, A Wish To Understand Where You Came From, Where The World Came From, All These Psychological Predispositions, Under The Right Cultural Conditions, Tend To Lead To People Believing In Things For Which There Is No Evidence.

The Odd Thing About Tradition Is, The Longer It's Been Going, The More People Seem To Take It Seriously - As Though Sheer Passage Of Time Makes Something Which To Begin With Was Just Made Up, Turns It Into What People Believe As A Fact.

People Really, Really Hate Their Religion Being Criticized. It's As Though You've Said They Had An Ugly Face; They Seem To Identify Personally With It.

Even Those Who Do Not, Or Cannot, Avail Themselves Of A Scientific Education, Choose To Benefit From The Technology That Is Made Possible By The Scientific Education Of Others.

Why Did God Make Tigers So Good At Catching Prey, And At The Same Time Make Prey So Good At Getting Away From Tigers? You'd Think That If God Wanted One Thing Or The Other To Happen He'd Have Engineered It Rather Better. Maybe He Enjoyed The Spectator Sport?

If You Are In The Camp I Am, One Place Where Science And Faith Could Touch Each Other Is In The Investigation Of Supposedly Miraculous Events.

Nobody Would Seriously Describe A Tiny Child As A Marxist Child Or An Anarchist Child Or A Post-modernist Child. Yet Children Are Routinely Labelled With The Religion Of Their Parents. We Need To Encourage People To Think Carefully Before Labelling Any Child Too Young To Know Their Own Opinions And Our Adverts Will Help To Do That.

If We Are Too Friendly To Nice, Decent Bishops, We Run The Risk Of Buying Into The Fiction That There's Something Virtuous About Believing Things Because Of Faith Rather Than Because Of Evidence. We Run The Risk Of Betraying Scientific Enlightenment.

You Cannot Be Both Sane And Well Educated And Disbelieve In Evolution. The Evidence Is So Strong That Any Sane, Educated Person Has Got To Believe In Evolution.

You Can Never Be Absolutely Certain That Anything Doesn't Exist. But You Can Show That It's Unlikely.

There Is Another Kind Of Altruism That Seems To Go Beyond That, A Kind Of Super-altruism, Which Humans Appear To Have. And I Think That Does Need A Darwinian Explanation.

The Bitter Hatreds That Now Poison Middle Eastern Politics Are Rooted In The Real Or Perceived Wrong Of The Setting Up Of A Jewish State In An Islamic Region. In View Of All That The Jews Had Been Through, It Must Have Seemed A Fair And Humane Solution. Probably Deep Familiarity With The Old Testament Had Given The European And American Decision-makers Some Sort Of Idea That This Really Was The Historic Homeland Of The Jews.

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.

Most People Understand That Sexual Lust Has To Do With Propagating Genes. Copulation In Nature Tends To Lead To Reproduction And So To More Genetic Copies. But In Modern Society, Most Copulations Involve Contraception, Designed Precisely To Avoid Reproduction. Altruism Probably Has Origins Like Those Of Lust.

For The First Half Of Geological Time Our Ancestors Were Bacteria. Most Creatures Still Are Bacteria, And Each One Of Our Trillions Of Cells Is A Colony Of Bacteria.

I Great Difficulty Having Any Respect For A Religion That Has So Little Confidence In The Truth Of Its Beliefs That It Feels Reduced To Using Threats In Order To Propagate Those Beliefs.

The Idea Of An Afterlife Where You Can Be Reunited With Loved Ones Can Be Immensely Consoling - Though Not To Me.

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

I'm Easily Persuaded That A Really Good Novelist Who Gets Inside Somebody Else's Head Could Be Serving A Valuable Purpose. I Enjoy Satirical Novels That Take A Wry, Humorous, Ironic Look At Modern Life.

Things Exist Either Because They Have Recently Come Into Existence Or Because They Have Qualities That Made Them Unlikely To Be Destroyed In The Past.

I Don't Want To Sound Callous. I Mean, Even If I Have Nothing To Offer, That Doesn't Matter, Because That Still Doesn't Mean That What Anybody Else Has To Offer Therefore Has To Be True.

I've Always Been Antagonistic To Any Naïve Application Of The Selfish Gene Theory To Politics. Some People Have Attempted To Suggest That It Means We Are Selfish Or We Should Be Selfish.

There's This Thing Called Being So Open-minded Your Brains Drop Out.

More Poignant For Us, At Laetoli In Tanzania Are The Companionable Footprints Of Three Real Hominids, Probably Australopithecus Afarensis, Walking Together 3.6 Million Years Ago In What Was Then Fresh Volcanic Ash. Who Does Not Wonder What These Individuals Were To Each Other, Whether They Held Hands Or Even Talked, And What Forgotten Errand They Shared In A Pliocene Dawn?

They Are Either People Of Faith Who Have Lost Their Faith From Reading My Books, Or They Are People Who Had Already Lost Their Faith, And Something About My Books Encouraged Them To Affirm That.

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

We've All Been Brought Up With The View That Religion Has Some Kind Of Special Privileged Status. You're Not Allowed To Criticise It.

All Qualified Physicists, Biologists, Cosmologists And Geologists Agree, On The Basis Of Massive, Mutually Corroborating Evidence, That The Earth's Age Is At Least Four Billion Years.

Humans Have More Moral Responsibility Perhaps, Because They Are Capable Of Reasoning.

[invading Iraq] Will Unite The Entire Arab World Against The West.

Molecular Genetics Can Show Off Some Surprising Relationships Like, For Example, The Close Relationship Of Whales To Hippopotamuses, Which I Think Nobody Ever Guessed Until Molecular Data Was Looked At. The Closest Relatives Of Whales Are Hippopotamuses, Even Closer Than Any Other Cloven-hoofed Animals.

If People Think God Is Interesting, The Onus Is On Them To Show That There Is Anything There To Talk About. Otherwise They Should Just Shut Up About It.

The Bible Should Be Taught, But Emphatically Not As Reality. It Is Fiction, Myth, Poetry, Anything But Reality. As Such It Needs To Be Taught Because It Underlies So Much Of Our Literature And Our Culture.

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Potential People Who Could Have Been Here In My Place But Who Will In Fact Never See The Light Of Day Outnumber The Sand Grains Of Sahara.

The Universe Doesn't Owe You A Sense Of Hope

Trending Author

Bruce Feirstein

Samuel R. Delany

Eugene Delacroix

Category