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Does Religion Fill A Much Needed Gap? It Is Often Said That There Is A God-shaped Gap In The Brain Which Needs To Be Filled: We Have A Psychological Need For God -- Imaginary Friend, Father, Big Brother, Confessor, Confidant -- And The Need Has To Be Satisfied Whether God Really Exists Or Not. But Could It Be That God Clutters Up A Gap That We'd Be Better Off Filling With Something Else? Science, Perhaps? Art? Human Friendship? Humanism? Love Of This Life In The Real World, Giving No Credence To Other Lives Beyond The Grave?

-Richard Dawkins

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Does Religion Fill A

Richard Dawkins

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Does Religion Fill A Much Needed Gap? It Is Often Said That There Is A God-shaped Gap In The Brain Which Needs To Be Filled: We Have A Psychological Need For God -- Imaginary Friend, Father, Big Brother, Confessor, Confidant -- And The Need Has To Be Satisfied Whether God Really Exists Or Not. But Could It Be That God Clutters Up A Gap That We'd Be Better Off Filling With Something Else? Science, Perhaps? Art? Human Friendship? Humanism? Love Of This Life In The Real World, Giving No Credence To Other Lives Beyond The Grave?

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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.

I Think From My Point Of View - I Won't Say It Doesn't Matter Whether [darwinian Explanations] Are Right Or Wrong, It's Just Sufficient In Some Cases, For Me, To Be Able To Say, Well, At Least It's Not Totally Implausible From A Darwinian Point Of View.

Cloning May Be Good And It May Be Bad. Probably It's A Bit Of Both. The Question Must Not Be Greeted With Reflex Hysteria But Decided Quietly, Soberly And On Its Own Merits. We Need Less Emotion And More Thought.

The Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus Has Shown Great Courage, In The Face Of Spiteful Vested Interests, In Demonstrating How Easy It Is For People To Concoct Memories That Are Entirely False But Which Seem, To The Victim, Every Bit As Real As True Memories.

Either It Is True That A Medicine Works Or It Isn't. It Cannot Be False In The Ordinary Sense But True In Some Alternative Sense. If A Therapy Or Treatment Is Anything More Than A Placebo, Properly Conducted Double-blind Trials, Statistically Analyzed, Will Eventually Bring It Through With Flying Colours. Many Candidates For Recognition As Orthodox Medicines Fail The Test And Are Summarily Dropped. The Alternative Label Should Not (though, Alas, It Does) Provide Immunity From The Same Fate.

I Don't Shout People Down. I Argue People Down, Perhaps.

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

Bertrand Russell Used A Hypothetical Teapot In Orbit About Mars For The Same Didactic Purpose. You Have To Be Agnostic About The Teapot, But That Doesn't Mean You Treat The Likelihood Of Its Existence As Being On All Fours With Its Non-existence.

My Interest In Biology Was Pretty Much Always On The Philosophical Side.

Organizing Atheists Is A Bit Like Herding Cats; They Are On The Whole Too Intelligent And Independent Minded To Lend Themselves To Being Herded.

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.

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.

It Has Become Almost A Cliché To Remark That Nobody Boasts Of Ignorance Of Literature, But It Is Socially Acceptable To Boast Ignorance Of Science And Proudly Claim Incompetence In Mathematics.

I've Never Heard Of William Craig. A Debate With Him Might Look Good On His Resume, But It Wouldn't Look Good On Mine!

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

Certainly Science Should Continue To See Whether We Can Find Evidence For Multiverses That Might Explain Why Our Own Universe Seems To Be So Finely Tuned.

I Hate The Neologism "owned" For "scored A Victory Over". I Have No Intention Of Owning Anyone, And Nobody Will Ever Own Me.

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.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

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

There Is An Attitude In The Culture That Says That Everybody Is Entitled To Their Opinion. You Got To Respect Their Opinion. No, You Damn Well Haven't Got To Respect Their Opinion.

Do You Really Mean To Tell Me The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward, Or To Avoid His Disapproval And Punishment? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up, Apple-polishing, Looking Over Your Shoulder At The Great Surveillance Camera In The Sky, Or The Still Small Wiretap Inside Your Head, Monitoring Your Every Move, Even Your Every Base Though.

Surveillance Cameras

Life Results From The Non-random Survival Of Randomly Varying Replicators. The Watchmaker Is Blind

If Complex Organisms Demand An Explanation, So Does A Complex Designer. And It's No Solution To Raise The Theologian's Plea That God (or The Intelligent Designer) Is Simply Immune To The Normal Demands Of Scientific Explanation. To Do So Would Be To Shoot Yourself In The Foot. You Cannot Have It Both Ways. Either Id Belongs In The Science Classroom, In Which Case It Must Submit To The Discipline Required Of A Scientific Hypothesis. Or It Does Not, In Which Case, Get It Out Of The Science Classroom And Send It Back To Church, Where It Belongs.

I'm Not So Fond Of The Sort Of Science Fiction That Isn't Really Science Fiction But Is Sometimes Thought To Be - Gothic Princesses And White Horses And Bats And Castles And Things.

I Am Passionate About Truth And Passionate About Clarity, And I Don't Regard Myself As Particularly Militant Or Aggressive. I Simply Wish To Discuss What Is True And To Listen To Evidence And Put Evidence Forward To Other People And Have A Sensible, Sane, Moderated Argument.

If There Is Something That Appears To Lie Beyond The Natural World As It Is Now Imperfectly Understood, We Hope To Eventually Understand It And Embrace It Within The Natural. As Ever When We Unweave A Rainbow, It Will Not Become Less Wonderful.

You Can't Blame Science For Being Used For Evil Purposes. What You Can Do Is Say, 'this Is An Exceedingly Powerful Tool.' And You Want To Make Sure It Is Used For Good Purposes, Not Bad Ones. That Is A Political Decision.

Yesterday's Dangerous Idea Is Today's Orthodoxy And Tomorrow's Cliché.

Dangerous Ideas

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.

The More Statistically Improbable A Thing Is, The Less We Can Believe That It Just Happened By Blind Chance. Superficially, The Obvious Alternative To Chance Is An Intelligent Designer.

As A Scientist, I Am Hostile To Fundamentalist Religion Because It Actively Debauches The Scientific Enterprise. It Teaches Us Not To Change Our Minds, And Not To Want To Know Exciting Things That Are Available To Be Known. It Subverts Science And Saps The Intellect.

Fundamentalist Religion

Discrimination Is Not Liberal. Arguing Against Discrimination Is Not Intolerance.

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.

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.

Like Computer Viruses, Successful Mind Viruses Will Tend To Be Hard For Their Victims To Detect. If You Are The Victim Of One, The Chances Are That You Won't Know It, And May Even Vigorously Deny It.

Personally, I Rather Look Forward To A Computer Program Winning The World Chess Championship. Humanity Needs A Lesson In Humility.

Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Can Never Hurt Me." The Adage Is True As Long As You Don't Really Believe The Words. But If Your Whole Upbringing, And Everything You Have Ever Been Told By Parents, Teachers And Priests, Has Led You To Believe, Really Believe, Utterly And Completely, That Sinners Burn In Hell (or Some Other Obnoxious Article Of Doctrine Such As That A Woman Is The Property Of Her Husband), It Is Entirely Plausible That Words Could Have A More Long-lasting And Damaging Effect Than Deeds.

[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.

Faith Is Belief Without Evidence And Reason; Coincidentally That's Also The Definition Of Delusion.

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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.

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

And The Beauty Of The Anthropic Principle Is That It Tells Us, Against All Intuition, That A Chemical Model Need Only Predict That Life Will Arise On One Planet In A Billion Billion To Give Us A Good And Entirely Satisfying Explanation For The Presence Of Life Here.

Francis [collins] Keeps Saying Things Like "from The Perspective Of A Believer." Once You Buy Into The Position Of Faith, Then Suddenly You Find Yourself Losing All Of Your Natural Skepticism And Your Scientific - Really Scientific - Credibility. I'm Sorry To Be So Blunt.

Finding Yourself

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

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When I Am Dying, I Should Like My Life Taken Out Under General Anaesthetic, Exactly As If It Were A Diseased Appendix.

Whether We Ever Get To Know About Them Or Not, There Are Very Probably Alien Civilizations That Are Superhuman, To The Point Of Being God-like In Ways That Exceed Anything A Theologian Could Possibly Imagine. Their Technical Achievements Would Seem As Supernatural To Us As Ours Would Seem To A Dark Age Peasant Transported To The Twenty-first Century. Imagine His Response To A Laptop Computer, A Mobile Telephone, A Hydrogen Bomb Or A Jumbo Jet.

If Something Is True, No Amount Of Wishful Thinking Will Change It.

Wishful Thinking

Do You Really Mean The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up.

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.

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

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?

All The Great Religions Have A Place For Awe, For Ecstatic Transport At The Wonder And Beauty Of Creation.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

Much As We Might Wish To Believe Otherwise, Universal Love And The Welfare Of The Species As A Whole Are Concepts Which Simply Do Not Make Evolutionary Sense.

Our Leaders Have Described The Recent Atrocity With The Customary Cliche: Mindless Cowardice. Mindless May Be A Suitable Word For The Vandalising Of A Telephone Box. It Is Not Helpful For Understanding What Hit New York On September 11. Those People Were Not Mindless And They Were Certainly Not Cowards. On The Contrary, They Had Sufficiently Effective Minds Braced With An Insane Courage, And It Would Pay Us Mightily To Understand Where That Courage Came From. It Came From Religion.

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

Do Not Indoctrinate Your Children. Teach Them How To Think For Themselves, How To Evaluate Evidence, And How To Disagree With You.

The Whole Point Of Religious Faith, Its Strength And Chief Glory, Is That It Does Not Depend On Rational Justification. The Rest Of Us Are Expected To Defend Our Prejudices. But Ask A Religious Person To Justify Their Faith And You Infringe 'religious Liberty'.

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.

If You Want To Do Evil, Science Provides The Most Powerful Weapons To Do Evil; But Equally, If You Want To Do Good, Science Puts Into Your Hands The Most Powerful Tools To Do So

I Think I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

I Think We Have Got To Start Again And Go Right Back To First Principles. The Argument I Shall Advance, Surprising As It May Seem Coming From The Author Of The Earlier Chapters, Is That, For An Understanding Of The Evolution Of Modern Man, We Must Begin By Throwing Out The Gene As The Sole Basis Of Our Ideas On Evolution. If There Is Only One Creator Who Made The Tiger And The Lamb, The Cheetah And The Gazelle, What Is He Playing At? Is He A Sadist Who Enjoys Spectator Blood Sports? ... Is He Manuvering To Maximize David Attenborough's Television Ratings?

I'm A Sucker For Nice Religious Leaders. I Fall For It Every Time.

I Detest 'jingle Bells,' 'white Christmas,' 'rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,' And The Obscene Spending Bonanza That Nowadays Seems To Occupy Not Just December, But November And Much Of October, Too.

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.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

But Perhaps The Rest Of Us Could Have Separate Classes In Science Appreciation, The Wonder Of Science, Scientific Ways Of Thinking, And The History Of Scientific Ideas, Rather Than Laboratory Experience.

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.

I Am One Of Those Scientists Who Feels That It Is No Longer Enough Just To Get On And Do Science. We Have To Devote A Significant Proportion Of Our Time And Resources To Defending It From Deliberate Attack From Organised Ignorance.

I Like To Think 'the God Delusion' Is A Humorous Book. I Think, Actually, It's Full Of Laughs. And People Who Describe It As A Polarizing Book Or As An Aggressive Book, It's Just That Very Often They Haven't Read It.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

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

It Is Grindingly, Creakingly, Crashingly Obvious That If Darwinism Was Really A Theory Of Chance, It Could Not Work.

Any Altruistic System Is Inherently Unstable, Because It Is Open To Abuse By Selfish Individuals, Ready To Exploit It.

Superficially It's A Problem If Homosexuality Is Genetic - If The Difference Between People's Sexual Preferences Is Genetic - Because At Least A Pure Homosexual Would Be Unlikely To Reproduce And Therefore Pass On The Genes. So The First Question You Ask Is, Is It Actually Genetic, And The Answer Is Probably To Some Extent Yes.

Design Can Never Be An Ultimate Explanation For Anything. It Can Only Be A Proximate Explanation. A Plane Or A Car Is Explained By A Designer But That's Because The Designer Himself, The Engineer, Is Explained By Natural Selection.

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

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

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.

Faith Is An Evil Precisely Because It Requires No Justification And Brooks No Argument.

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.

No Educated Person Believes The Adam And Eve Myth Nowadays, But It's Surprising How Many Parents Think That It's Somehow Fun To Pass On This Falsehood To Their Children...i Would Want To Argue That The Truth Of Evolution Is More Interesting And More Poetic

Can Omniscient God, Who Knows The Future, Find The Omnipotence To Change His Future Mind?

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.

I Think That There Are Good Things That Happen And Bad Things That Happen.

The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve - Which Runs From The Head To The Voice Box - Goes All The Way Down Into The Chest, Loops Around A Major Artery, Then Goes All The Way Back Up Again. It Goes Right Past The Larynx On The Way Down. All A Decent Designer Would Have To Do Is Loop It Off At That Point. What We're Looking At Is The Legacy Of History.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

The Argument From Improbability, Properly Deployed, Comes Close To Proving That God Does Not Exist.

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.

Suffering Is A Byproduct Of Evolution By Natural Selection, An Inevitable Consequence That May Worry Us In Our More Sympathetic Moments But Cannot Be Expected To Worry A Tiger - Even If A Tiger Can Be Said To Worry About Anything At All - And Certainly Cannot Be Expected To Worry Its Genes.

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

The Feature Of Living Matter That Most Demands Explanation Is That It Is Almost Unimaginably Complicated In Directions That Convey A Powerful Illusion Of Deliberate Design.

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.

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.

There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

By All Means Let's Be Open-minded, But Not So Open-minded That Our Brains Drop Out. -this Quote Is Actually Found In Carl Sagan's Book The Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark, Where He Attributes It To Engineer James Oberg, Who Says He Stole It From Someone Else.

Even If It Were True That We Need God To Be Moral, It Would Of Course Not Make God's Existence More Likely, Merely More Desirable (many People Cannot Tell The Difference)

Not Only Is Science Corrosive To Religion, But Religion Is Corrosive To Science. It Teaches People To Be Satisfied With Trivial Non-explanations And Blinds Them To The Wonderful Real Explanations That We Have Within Our Grasp.

Most Of The Ones [nobel Prizes] That Have Gone To Muslims Have Been Peace Prizes, And The [number Of Muslims] Who Have Gotten Them For Scientific Work Is Exceedingly Low. But In Jews, It Is Exceedingly High.

Molecular Evidense Suggests That Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees Lived, In Africa, Between 5 And 7 Million Years Ago, Say Half A Million Generations Ago. This Is Not Long By Evolutionary Standards.

I Am Agnostic Only To The Extent That I Am Agnostic About Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

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.

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.

Science Coverage Could Be Improved By The Recognition That Science Is Timeless, And Therefore Science Stories Should Not Need To Be Pegged To An Item In The News.

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.

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

The Virgin Birth, The Resurrection, The Raising Of Lazarus, Even The Old Testament Miracles, All Are Freely Used For Religious Propaganda, And They Are Very Effective With An Audience Of Unsophisticates And Children

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

The Evidence For Evolution Is So Compelling That The Only Way To Save The Creation Theory Is To Assume That God Deliberately Planted Enormous Quantities Of Evidence To Make It Look As If Evolution Had Happened.

Enormous Quantities

It Can Be Consoling To Think Your Children Are In Heaven. You Have Got To Understand That That Doesn't Make It True. Many People Cannot Understand That Distinction.

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.

I Don't Understand Why So Many People Who Are Sophisticated In Science Go On Believing In God. I Wish I Did.

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.

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.

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

When I Say That Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines, One Shouldn't Put Too Much Emphasis On The Word 'just.' There Is A Very Great Deal Of Complication, And Indeed Beauty In Being A Gene Machine.

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

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.

Science Has Taught Us, Against All Intuition, That Apparently Solid Things Like Crystals And Rocks Are Really Almost Entirely Composed Of Empty Space. And The Familiar Illustration Is The Nucleus Of An Atom Is A Fly In The Middle Of A Sports Stadium, And The Next Atom Is In The Next Sports Stadium.

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

That Was Unfortunate. I Should Have Compared Religion With Religion And Compared Islam Not With Trinity College But With Jews, Because The Number Of Jews Who Have Won Nobel Prizes Is Phenomenally High.

Yes, Testosterone-sodden Young Men Too Unattractive To Get A Woman In This World Might Be Desperate Enough To Go For 72 Private Virgins In The Next.

Our Brains Are Separate And Independent Enough From Our Genes To Rebel Against Them.. We Do So In A Small Way Everytime We Use Contraception. There Is No Reason Why We Should Not Rebel In A Large Way Too.

What You Cannot Have Is A Gene That Sacrifices Itself For The Benefit Of Other Genes. What You Can Have Is A Gene That Makes Organisms Sacrifice Themselves For Other Organisms Under The Influence Of Selfish Genes.

If Children Were Taught To Question And Think Through Their Beliefs, Instead Of Being Taught The Superior Virtue Of Faith Without Question, It Is A Good Bet That There Would Be No Suicide Bombers.

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 Would Challenge The Statement That My Scientific Instincts Are Any Less Rigorous Than [richard Dawkins]. The Difference Is That My Presumption Of The Possibility Of God And Therefore The Supernatural Is Not Zero, And Yours Is.

The Essence Of Life Is Statistical Improbability On A Colossal Scale.

If Saying That Religion Should Be A Private Matter And Should Not Have Special Influence In Public Life Is Illiberal, Then 74% Of U.k. Christians Are Illiberal, Too.

If You Listen To Two People Who Are Arguing About Something, And They Each Of Them Have Passionate Faith That They're Right, But They Believe Different Things---they Belong To Different Religions, Different Faiths, There Is Nothing They Can Do To Settle Their Disagreement Short Of Shooting Each Other, Which Is What They Very Often Actually Do.

Why, I Can't Help Wondering, Is God Thought To Need Such Ferocious Defence? One Might Have Supposed Him Amply Capable Of Looking After Himself.

Isn't It Sad To Go To Your Grave Without Ever Wondering Why You Were Born? Who, With Such A Thought, Would Not Spring From Bed, Eager To Resume Discovering The World And Rejoicing To Be Part Of It?

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.

You Can't Understand European History At All Other Than Through Religion, Or English Literature Either If You Can't Recognise Biblical Allusions.

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.

In A Way, I Think Religion Is To Be Admired For Asking The Right Questions. I Just Think It's Got The Wrong Answers.

It Is Quite True That Many Scientists, Many Physicists, Maintain That The Physical Constants, The Half Dozen Or So Numbers That Physicists Have To Simply Assume In Order To Derive The Rest Of Their Understanding ... Have To Be Assumed. You Can't Provide A Rationale For Why Those Numbers Are There. Physicists Have Calculated That If Any Of These Numbers Was A Little Bit Different, The Universe As We Know It Wouldn't Exist.

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

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

Faith Is One Of The World's Great Evils, Comparable To The Smallpox Virus But Harder To Eradicate.

Mad Cow Disease

I Could Easily Believe That Religion Could Enhance Health And Hence Survival, And That Therefore There Could Be Indeed Be Literally Darwinian Survival Value, Darwinian Selection In Favor Of Religion. None Of That Of Course Bears At All Upon The Truth Value Of The Claims Made By Religions.

Design Cannot Precede Evolution And Therefore Cannot Underlie The Universe.

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

Creationists Eagerly Seek A Gap In Present-day Knowledge Or Understanding. If An Apparent Gap Is Found, It Is Assumed That God, By Default, Must Fill It.

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.

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.

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Meaning.

There Are All Sorts Of Things That Would Be Comforting. I Expect An Injection Of Morphine Would Be Comforting... But To Say That Something Is Comforting Is Not To Say That It's True.

There Are Many Religious Points Of View Where The Conservation Of The World Is Just As Important As It Is To Scientists.

I Suspect The Reason Is That Most People [...] Have A Residue Of Feeling That Darwinian Evolution Isn't Quite Big Enough To Explain Everything About Life. All I Can Say As A Biologist Is That The Feeling Disappears Progressively The More You Read About And Study What Is Known About Life And Evolution. I Want To Add One Thing More. The More You Understand The Significance Of Evolution, The More You Are Pushed Away From The Agnostic Position And Towards Atheism. Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

My Point Is Not That Religion Itself Is The Motivation For Wars, Murders And Terrorist Attacks, But That Religion Is The Principal Label, And The Most Dangerous One, By Which A "they" As Opposed To A "we" Can Be Identified At All.

Religion Is The Root Of Quite A Lot Of Evil.

It Is An Essential Part Of The Scientific Enterprise To Admit Ignorance, Even To Exult In Ignorance As A Challenge To Future Conquests.

I Do Disapprove Very Strongly Of Labelling Children, Especially Young Children, As Something Like 'catholic Children' Or 'protestant Children' Or 'islamic Children.'

The Story Of Doubting Thomas Is Told, Not So That We Shall Admire Thomas, But So That We Can Admire The Other Apostles In Comparison. Thomas Demanded Evidence … The Other Apostles, Whose Faith Was So Strong That They Did Not Need Evidence, Are Held To Us As Worthy Of Imitation.

Be Thankful That You Have A Life, And Forsake Your Vain And Presumptuous Desire For A Second One.

What Are All Of Us But Self-reproducing Robots? We Have Been Put Together By Our Genes And What We Do Is Roam The World Looking For A Way To Sustain Ourselves And Ultimately Produce Another Robot Child.

In Childhood Our Credulity Serves Us Well. It Helps Us To Pack, With Extraordinary Rapidity, Our Skulls Full Of The Wisdom Of Our Parents And Our Ancestors. But If We Don't Grow Out Of It In The Fullness Of Time, Our ... Nature Makes Us A Sitting Target For Astrologers, Mediums, Gurus, Evangelists, And Quacks. We Need To Replace The Automatic Credulity Of Childhood With The Constructive Skepticism Of Adult Science.

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

Textbooks Describe Dna As A Blueprint For A Body. It's Better Seen As A Recipe For Making A Body, Because It Is Irreversible. But Today I Want To Present It As Something Different Again, And Even More Intriguing. The Dna In You Is A Coded Description Of Ancient Worlds In Which Your Ancestors Lived. Dna Is The Wisdom Out Of The Old Days, And I Mean Very Old Days Indeed.

Each Step Is Not Too Improbable For Us To Countenance, But When You Add Them Up Cumulatively Over Millions Of Years, You Get These Monsters Of Improbability, Like The Human Brain And The Rain Forest. It Should Warn Us Against Ever Again Assuming That Because Something Is Complicated, God Must Have Done It.

The List Of Things About Which We Strictly Have To Be Agnostic Doesn't Stop At Tooth Fairies And Celestial Teapots. It Is Infinite. If You Want To Believe In A Particular One Of Them - Teapots, Unicorns, Or Tooth Fairies, Thor Or Yahweh - The Onus Is On You To Say Why You Believe In It. The Onus Is Not On The Rest Of Us To Say Why We Do Not. We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

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.

If You Look Up At The Milky Way Through The Eyes Of Carl Sagan, You Get A Feeling In Your Chest Of Something Greater Than Yourself. And It Is. But It's Not Supernatural.

Over The Centuries, We've Moved On From Scripture To Accumulate Precepts Of Ethical, Legal And Moral Philosophy. We've Evolved A Liberal Consensus Of What We Regard As Underpinnings Of Decent Society, Such As The Idea That We Don't Approve Of Slavery Or Discrimination On The Grounds Of Race Or Sex, That We Respect Free Speech And The Rights Of The Individual. All Of These Things That Have Become Second Nature To Our Morals Today Owe Very Little To Religion, And Mostly Have Been Won In Opposition To The Teeth Of Religion.

Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

The Genetic Code Is Not A Binary Code As In Computers, Nor An Eight-level Code As In Some Telephone Systems, But A Quaternary Code With Four Symbols. The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computerlike.

My Computer Is A Very Complex Gadget And It Was Designed By Many Designers, So Why Must The Universe Have Only A Single Designer And Not Many Designers?

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.

The Less You Think, The More You Believe.

Such Delusions Of Grandeur To Think That A God With A Hundred Billion Galaxies On His Mind Would Give A Tuppenny Damn Who You Sleep With, Or Indeed Whether You Believe In Him.

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.

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.

Faith Rests Squarely Upon Reason, But With The Added Component Of Revelation.

There Are Sincere Believers Who Interpret Genesis 1 And 2 In A Very Literal Way That Is Inconsistent, Frankly, With Our Knowledge Of The Universe's Age Or Of How Living Organisms Are Related To Each Other.

If You Were To Actually Travel Around Schools And Universities And Listen In On Lectures About Evolution You Might Find A Fairly Substantial Fraction Of Young People, Without Knowing What It Is They Disapprove Of, Think They Disapprove Of It, Because They've Been Brought Up To.

I Am Not Absolutely Positive There Is No God. Only In The Sense That I'm Not Absolutely Positive There Is No Large China Teapot In Orbit In The Solar System.

Just Imagine The Banner Headlines If A Marine Biologist Were To Discover A Species Of Dolphin That Wove Large, Intricately Meshed Fishing Nets, Twenty Dolphin-lengths In Diameter! Yet We Take A Spider Web For Granted, As A Nuisance In The House Rather Than As One Of The Wonders Of The World. And Think Of The Furore If Jane Goodall Returned From Gombe Stream With Photographs Of Wild Chimpanzees Building Their Own Houses, Well Roofed And Insulated, Of Painstakingly Selected Stones Neatly Bonded And Mortared! Yet Caddis Larvae, Who Do Precisely That, Command Only Passing Interest.

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'.

Something Pretty Mysterious Had To Give Rise To The Origin Of The Universe.

I Guess There Are Some Rights Of Parents With What They Choose Their Children To Learn, But I'm Biased In Favor Of Freeing Children To Learn And Not Letting Parents Be Too Doctrinaire In Indoctrinating Their Children.

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

Evolution Has Been Observed. It's Just That It Hasn't Been Observed While It's Happening.

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

Cheetah Genes Cooperate With Cheetah Genes But Not With Camel Genes, And Vice Versa. This Is Not Because Cheetah Genes, Even In The Most Poetic Sense, See Any Virtue In The Preservation Of The Cheetah Species. They Are Not Working To Save The Cheetah From Extinction Like Some Molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Most Thoughtful People Would Agree That Morality In The Absence Of Policing Is Somehow More Truly Moral Than The Kind Of False Morality That Vanishes As Soon As The Police Go On Strike Or The Spy Camera Is Switched Off, Whether The Spy Camera Is A Real One Monitored In The Police Station Or An Imaginary One In Heaven.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

I Do Understand People When They Say That You Destroy The Magic Of Childhood If You Encourage Too Much Skeptical Questioning.

It's Very Likely That Most Mammals Have Consciousness, And Probably Birds, Too.

The Whole Of Technology Depends On A Scientific Background, And Of Course Technology Can Be Used For Evil Purposes. You Can't Blame Science For That.

We Should Learn To Understand Natural Selection, So That We Can Oppose Any Tendency To Apply It To Human Politics.

I Am Persuaded That 'child Abuse' Is No Exaggeration When Used To Describe What Teachers And Priests Are Doing To Children Whom They Encourage To Believe In Something Like...eternal Hell.

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.

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.

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.

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