Background Image

...

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.

-Richard Dawkins

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

We Are Going To

Richard Dawkins

...

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.

Views: 14452

Topic

More From Richard Dawkins

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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.

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.

I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular. I Suppose I Have To Say Politically I Would Like Religion To Become Gentler And Nicer And To Stop Interfering With Other People's Lives, Stop Repressing Women, Stop Indoctrinating Children, All That Sort Of Thing. But I Really, Really Would Like To See Religion Go Away Altogether.

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

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

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.

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

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

Nature Is Not Cruel, Only Pitilessly Indifferent. This Is One Of The Hardest Lessons For Humans To Learn. We Cannot Admit That Things Might Be Neither Good Nor Evil, Neither Cruel Nor Kind, But Simply Callous-indifferent To All Suffering, Lacking All Purpose.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

However Brief Our Time In The Sun, If We Waste A Second Of It, Or Complain That It Is Dull Or Barren Or (like A Child) Boring, Couldn't This Be Seen As A Callous Insult To Those Unborn Trillions Who Will Never Even Be Offered Life In The First Place?

Many Of Us Saw Religion As Harmless Nonsense. Beliefs Might Lack All Supporting Evidence But, We Thought, If People Needed A Crutch For Consolation, Where's The Harm? September 11th Changed All That.

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.

...it Is A Telling Fact That, The World Over, The Vast Majority Of Children Follow The Religion Of Their Parents Rather Than Any Of The Other Available Religions.

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.

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.

There Is No Reason To Regard God As Immune From Consideration Along The Spectrum Of Probabilities. And There Is Certainly No Reason To Suppose That, Just Because God Can Be Neither Proved Nor Disproved, His Probability Of Existence Is 50 Per Cent.

If You Divide Christians Into Denominations, Agnostics And Atheists Come In Third, Behind Catholics And Baptists. That's Interesting When You Contrast It With The Lack Of Influence Of Nonbelievers.

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.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

Science Replaces Private Prejudice With Public, Verifiable Evidence.

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.

Science Shares With Religion The Claim That It Answers Deep Questions About Origins, The Nature Of Life, And The Cosmos. But There The Resemblance Ends. Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

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.

Religion Ends And Philosophy Begins, Just As Alchemy Ends And Chemistry Begins, And Astrology Ends And Astronomy Begins.

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.

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.

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.

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

It Is Universally Accepted That An Admission Of Atheism Would Be Instant Political Suicide For Any (u.s.) Presidential Candidate.

No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth.

There Is A Tendency For People To Say Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Inappropriate.

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

The Less You Think, The More You Believe.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Science Is Wonderful, Science Is Important, And So Are Children, So Are Young People, And So What Could Be Better Than To Write A Science Book For Young People?

So It Is Best To Keep An Open Mind And Be Agnostic. At First Sight That Seems An Unassailable Position, At Least In The Weak Sense Of Pascal's Wager. But On Second Thoughts It Seems A Cop-out, Because The Same Could Be Said Of Father Christmas And Tooth Fairies. There May Be Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden. There Is No Evidence For It, But You Can't Prove That There Aren't Any, So Shouldn't We Be Agnostic With Respect To Fairies?

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.

I Think More Than 20 Percent Of Nobel Prizes Have Been Won By Jews.

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

But, However Many Ways There May Be Of Being Alive, It Is Certain That There Are Vastly More Ways Of Being Dead, Or Rather Not Alive.

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

Evolution May Explain Some Features Of The Moral Law, But It Can't Explain Why It Should Have Any Real Significance.

Nothing Is Wrong With Peace And Love. It Is All The More Regrettable That So Many Of Christ's Followers Seem To Disagree.

People Sometimes Try To Score Debating Points By Saying, Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Correct, But It's Important To Understand What That Means. It Is Also Only A Theory That The World Goes Round The Sun - It's Just A Theory For Which There Is An Immense Amount Of Evidence. There Are Many Scientific Theories That Are In Doubt. Even Within Evolution, There Is Some Room For Controversy. But That We Are Cousins Of Apes And Jackals And Starfish, Let's Say, That Is A Fact In The Ordinary Sense Of The Word.

I Am Against Religion Because It Teaches Us To Be Satisfied With Not Understanding The World.

Words Are Our Servants, Not Our Masters. For Different Purposes, We Find It Convenient To Use Words In Different Senses.

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

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.

It's Very Important To Try To Inculcate Into Children Moral Rules, Such As "do As You Would Be Done By."

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

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.

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.

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

I Have Often Said That I Am A Passionate Darwinian When It Comes To Explaining Why We Exist.

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.

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

...i Am Not Attacking Any Particular God Or Gods. I Am Attacking God, All Gods, Anything And Everything Supernatural, Whenever Or Wherever They Have Been Or Will Be Invented.

Anything And Everything

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.

Luke [the Gospel Writer] Screws Up His Dating By Tactlessly Mentioning Events That Historians Are Capable Of Independently Checking. There Was Indeed A Census Under Governor Quirinius - A Local Census, Not One Decreed By Caesar Augustus For The Empire As A Whole - But It Happened Too Late In 6 Ad, Long After Herod's Death.

You Can Make Some Inferences About A Man's Character If You Know Something About The Conditions In Which He Has Survived And Prospered.

Real Life Seeks The Gentle Slopes At The Back Of Mount Improbable, While Creationists Are Blind To All But The Daunting Precipice At The Front.

It Is Immoral To Brand Children With Religion. 'this Is A Catholic Child.' 'that Is A Muslim Child.' I Want Everyone To Flinch When They Hear Such A Phrase, Just As They Would If They Heard, 'that Is A Marxist Child.'

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

If It Suits [god] To Be A Deity That We Must Seek Without Being Forced To, Would It Not Have Been Sensible For Him To Use The Mechanism Of Evolution Without Posting Obvious Road Signs To Reveal His Role In Creation?

I Am Not An Enthusiast For Diversity Of Opinion Where Facts Are Concerned.

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.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

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.

Humans Are Just A Very, Very Small Part Of The Panoply Of Life, And It Is Arguable That In A Certain Sense, Humans Have Emancipated Themselves From Darwinian Selection.

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.

I Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

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.

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.

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

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

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

We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

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

I Think That's The Mother And Father Of All Cop-outs. It's An Honest Scientific Quest To Discover Where This Apparent Improbability Comes From. Now [francis] Collins Says, "well, God Did It. And God Needs No Explanation Because God Is Outside All This." Well, What An Incredible Evasion Of The Responsibility To Explain. Scientists Don't Do That. Scientists Say, "we're Working On It. We're Struggling To Understand."

[r]eductionism' Is One Of Those Things, Like Sin, That Is Only Mentioned By People Who Are Against It. To Call Oneself A Reductionist Will Sound, In Some Circles, A Bit Like Admitting To Eating Babies. But, Just As Nobody Actually Eats Babies, So Nobody Is Really A Reductionist In Any Sense Worth Being Against.

It Often Turns Out On Closer Inspection That Acts Of Apparent Altruism Are Really Selfishness In Disguise.

There May Be Some Deep Questions About The Cosmos That Are Forever Beyond Science. The Mistake Is To Think They Are Therefore Not Beyond Religion Too.

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.

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

Religion Teaches The Dangerous Nonsense That Death Is Not The End.

Without Gradualness...we Are Back To A Miracle.

If You Want To Do Bad Things, Science Is The Most Powerful Way To Do Them.

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

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

Mad Cow Disease

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.

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.

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.

The Question Of Whether There Exists A Supernatural Creator, A God, Is One Of The Most Important That We Have To Answer. I Think That It Is A Scientific Question. My Answer Is No.

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.

Our Brains Have Evolved To Help Us Survive Within The Orders Of Magnitude Of Size And Speed Which Our Bodies Operate At. We Never Evolved To Navigate In The World Of Atoms.

The Idea Of A Divine Creator Belittles The Elegant Reality Of The Universe.

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.

We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christianity, Just As Much As Islam, Teaches Children That Unquestioned Faith Is A Virtue. You Don't Have To Make The Case For What You Believe. If Somebody Announces That It Is Part Of His Faith, The Rest Of Society, Whether Of The Same Faith, Or Another, Or Of None, Is Obliged, By Ingrained Custom, To "respect" It Without Question; Respect It Until The Day It Manifests Itself In A Horrible Massacre Like The Destruction Of The World Trade Center, Or The London Or Madrid Bombings.

When You Plant A Fertile Meme In My Mind You Literally Parasitize My Brain, Turning It Into A Vehicle For The Meme's Propagation In Just The Way That A Virus May Parasitize The Genetic Mechanism Of A Host Cell.

People Who Criticize The Selfish Gene Like That Often Haven't Read It. The Selfish Gene Accounts For Altruism Toward Kin And Individuals Who Might Be In A Position To Reciprocate Your Altruism.

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

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

There Is Great Variation In Brain Power All The Way From Einstien On One Hand To Sarah Palin On The Other.

We Don't Need Fossils - The Case For Evolution Is Watertight Without Them; So It Is Paradoxical To Use Gaps In The Fossil Record As Though They Were Evidence Against Evolution

Science May Be Weird And Incomprehensible--more Weird And Less Comprehensible Than Any Theology--but Science Works. It Gets Results. It Can Fly You To Saturn, Slingshotting You Around Venus And Jupiter On The Way. We May Not Understand Quantum Theory (heaven Knows, I Don't), But A Theory That Predicts The Real World To Ten Decimal Places Cannot In Any Straightforward Sense Be Wrong.

Explaining Is A Difficult Art. You Can Explain Something So That Your Reader Understands The Words; And You Can Explain Something So That The Reader Feels It In The Marrow Of His Bones. To Do The Latter, It Sometimes Isn't Enough To Lay The Evidence Before The Reader In A Dispassionate Way. You Have To Become An Advocate And Use The Tricks Of The Advocate's Trade.

I Think The Important Thing To Learn Is That We Can Retain A Sentimental Loyalty To The Cultural And Literary Traditions Of, Say, Judaism, Anglicanism Or Islam, And Even Participate In Religious Rituals Such As Marriages And Funerals, Without Buying Into The Supernatural Beliefs That Historically Went Along With Those Traditions. We Can Give Up Belief In God While Not Losing Touch With A Treasured Heritage.

I Speak As A Private Citizen And Not As A Representative Of The Executive Branch Of The United States Government. The Impression That People Of Faith Are Uniformly Opposed To Stem-cell Research Is Not Documented By Surveys. In Fact, Many People Of Strong Religious Conviction Think This Can Be A Morally Supportable Approach.

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.

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.

Five Per Cent Vision Is Better Than No Vision At All. Five Per Cent Hearing Is Better Than No Hearing At All. Five Per Cent Flight Efficiency Is Better Than No Flight At All. It Is Thoroughly Believable That Every Organ Or Apparatus That We Actually See Is The Product Of A Smooth Trajectory Through Animal Space, A Trajectory In Which Every Intermediate Stage Assisted Survival And Reproduction.

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

The Obvious Objections To The Execution Of Saddam Hussein Are Valid And Well Aired. His Death Will Provoke Violent Strife Between Sunni And Shia Muslims, And Between Iraqis In General And The American Occupation Forces.

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.

I Think By The Age Of About Nine I Recognized That There Were A Lot Of Different Religions, And It Was An Accident I Happened To Be Born Into One Of Them. If I Had Been Born Somewhere Else, I Would Have Had A Different One. Which Is A Pretty Good Lesson, Actually. Everyone Should Learn That.

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

Evolution Is As Much A Fact As The Heat Of The Sun.

Heat Of The Sun

There Is No Reason For Believing That Any Sort Of Gods Exist, And Quite Good Reasons For Believing That They Do Not Exist And Never Have. It Has All Been A Gigantic Waste Of Time And A Waste Of Life. It Would Be A Joke Of Cosmic Proportions If It Weren't So Tragic.

An Internet Meme Is A Hijacking Of The Original Idea. Instead Of Mutating By Random Change And Spreading By A Form Of Darwinian Selection, Internet Memes Are Altered Deliberately By Human Creativity. There Is No Attempt At Accuracy Of Copying, As With Genes - And As With Memes In Their Original Version.

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 Book Is True, And If Evidence Seems To Condtradict It, It Is The Evidence That Must Be Thrown Out Not The Book.

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

Religion And Science Have Nothing To Do With Each Other, They're About Different Things, Science Is About The Way The World Works And Religion Is About [...] Miracles. [...] And In Any Case, If You Ask Most Ordinary People In Church Or In A Mosque Why They Believe, It's Almost Certainly Got Something To Do With The Belief That God Does Wonderful Things, That God Intervenes, That God Heals The Sick, That God Answers Prayers, God Forgives Sins.

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?

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.

My Thoughts, My Beliefs, My Feelings Are All In My Brain. My Brain Is Going To Rot.

Steve Grand Is The Creator Of What I Think Is The Nearest Approach To Artificial Life So Far, And His First Book, Creation: Life And How To Make It, Is As Interesting As You Would Expect. But He Illuminates More Than Just The Properties Of Life: His Originality Extends To Matter Itself And The Very Nature Of Reality. Not Since David Deutsch's The Fabric Of Reality Have I Encountered Such A Compelling Invitation To Think Everything Out Afresh, From The Bottom Up.

The Illusion Of Design Is So Successful That To This Day Most Americans (including, Significantly, Many Influential And Rich Americans) Stubbornly Refuse To Believe It Is An Illusion.

We Are Machines Built By Dna Whose Purpose Is To Make More Copies Of The Same Dna. ... This Is Exactly What We Are For. We Are Machines For Propagating Dna, And The Propagation Of Dna Is A Self-sustaining Process. It Is Every Living Object's Sole Reason For Living.

Maybe Somewhere In Some Other Galaxy There Is A Super-intelligence So Colossal That From Our Point Of View It Would Be A God. But It Cannot Have Been The Sort Of God That We Need To Explain The Origin Of The Universe, Because It Cannot Have Been There That Early.

I Believe That An Orderly Universe, One Indifferent To Human Preoccupations, In Which Everything Has An Explanation Even If We Still Have A Long Way To Go Before We Find It, Is A More Beautiful, More Wonderful Place Than A Universe Tricked Out With Capricious Ad Hoc Magic.

I Think That [jay] Gould's Separate Compartments Was A Purely Political Ploy To Win Middle-of-the-road Religious People To The Science Camp. But It's A Very Empty Idea. There Are Plenty Of Places Where Religion Does Not Keep Off The Scientific Turf.

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

By Dislaiming The Idea Of A Next Life, We Can Take More Excitement In This One!

If Any Remedy Is Tested Under Controlled Scientific Conditions And Proved To Be Effective, It Will Cease To Be Alternative And Will Simply Become Medicine. So-called Alternative Medicine Either Hasn't Been Tested Or It Has Failed Its Tests.

I Can't Be Sure God Does Not Exist. On A Scale Of Seven, Where One Means I Know He Exists, And Seven I Know He Doesn't, I Call Myself A Six. That Doesn't Mean I'm Absolutely Confident, That I Absolutely Know, Because I Don't.

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.

I Had Always Been Scrupulously Careful To Avoid The Smallest Suggestion Of Infant Indoctrination, Which I Think Is Ultimately Responsible For Much Of The Evil In The World. Others, Less Close To Her, Showed No Such Scruples, Which Upset Me, As I Very Much Wanted Her, As I Want All Children, To Make Up Her Own Mind Freely When She Became Old Enough To Do So. I Would Encourage Her To Think, Without Telling Her What To Think.

... You Need More Than Luck To Navigate Successfully Through A Thousand Sieves In Succession.

St. Augustine Explicitly Warns Against A Very Narrow Perspective That Will Put Our Faith At Risk Of Looking Ridiculous. If You Step Back From That One Narrow Interpretation, What The Bible Describes Is Very Consistent With The Big Bang.

I Think That A New Kind Of Replicator Has Recently Emerged On This Very Planet. It Is Staring Us In The Face. It Is Still In Its Infancy, Still Drfiting Clumsily About In Its Primeval Soup, But Already It Is Achieving Evolutionary Change At A Rate Which Leaves The Old Gene Panting Far Behind.

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'm Not Much Given To Straight, Irony-free Hero-worship.

The Atheist View Is Correspondingly Life-affirming And Life-enhancing, While At The Same Time Never Being Tainted With Self-delusion, Wishful Thinking, Or The Whingeing Self-pity Of Those Who Feel That Life Owes Them Something.

The Deceitful Misquoting Of Scientists To Suit An Anti-scientific Agenda Ranks Among The Many Unchristian Habits Of Fundamentalist Authors.

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

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

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

Writing A Computer Virus Program Is Child's Play. Any Fool Can Do It, Which Is Why The Silly Little Twerps Who Do Have Nothing To Be Proud Of.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

It Is Interesting To Ask Whether There's Any General Reason Why Being Religious Might Make You Do Nice Things Or Indeed Nasty Things. It's Possible That People Do Nice Things Because They're Religious. One Reason Might Be They're Hoping For A Reward In Heaven, Which Is Not A Very Noble Reason.

Evolution Has No Long-term Goal. There Is No Long-distance Target, No Final Perfection To Serve As A Criterion For Selection, Although Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

Even If Not A Single Fossil Has Ever Been Found, The Evidence From Surviving Animals Would Still Overwhelmingly Force The Conclusion That Darwin Was Right.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

You Believe That All Humanity Came From Adam And Eve, And Humans Have Not Evolved At All Since. So Tell Me; Between The Two Of Them, Which Was Black, Which Was White, And Which Was Asian?

If Ever There Was A Slamming Of The Door In The Face Of Constructive Investigation, It Is The Word Miracle. To A Medieval Peasant, A Radio Would Have Seemed Like A Miracle.

Science Tells Us What We Have Reason To Believe. Not What We Have A Duty To Believe. Not What Experts, In Their Pontificating Wisdom, Instruct Us To Believe... No, Science Tells Us What There Is Good Reason To Believe.

I'm Fond Of Science Fiction. But Not All Science Fiction. I Like Science Fiction Where There's A Scientific Lesson, For Example - When The Science Fiction Book Changes One Thing But Leaves The Rest Of Science Intact And Explores The Consequences Of That. That's Actually Very Valuable.

There Is A Whole Field Of Inquiry That Has Come Up In The Last 30 Or 40 Years - Some Call It Sociobiology Or Evolutionary Psychology - Relating To Where We Get Our Moral Sense And Why We Value The Idea Of Altruism, And Locating Both Answers In Behavioral Adaptations For The Preservation Of Our Genes.

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'.

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.

A God Capable Of Continuously Monitoring And Controlling The Individual Status Of Every Particle In The Universe Cannot Be Simple. His Existence Is Going To Need A Mammoth Explanation In Its Own Right.

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

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.

I Do Feel Visceral Revulsion At The Burka Because For Me It Is A Symbol Of The Oppression Of Women.

The Fact That Life Evolved Out Of Nearly Nothing, Some 10 Billion Years After The Universe Evolved Out Of Literally Nothing, Is A Fact So Staggering That I Would Be Mad To Attempt Words To Do It Justice.

The World And The Universe Is An Extremely Beautiful Place, And The More We Understand About It The More Beautiful Does It Appear.

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.

St. Augustine Wrote That Basically It Is Not Possible To Understand What Was Being Described In Genesis. It Was Not Intended As A Science Textbook. It Was Intended As A Description Of Who God Was, Who We Are And What Our Relationship Is Supposed To Be With God.

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

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.

False Beliefs Can Be Every Bit As Consoling As True Ones, Right Up Until The Moment Of Disillusionment.

Matthew And Luke Handle The Problem Differently, By Deciding That Jesus Must Have Been Born In Bethlehem After All. But They Get Him There By Different Routes.

There Is Enough Information Capacity In A Single Human Cell To Store The Encyclopedia Britannica, All 30 Volumes Of It, Three Or Four Times Over.

Encyclopedia Britannica

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

What Really Happens Is That The Gene Pool Becomes Filled With Genes That Influence Bodies In Such A Way That They Behave 'as If' They Made Complex, If Unconscious, Cost/benefit Calculations

All The World’s Muslims Have Fewer Nobel Prizes Than Trinity College, Cambridge. They Did Great Things In The Middle Ages, Though.

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

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

It Is Absolutely Safe To Say That If You Meet Somebody Who Claims Not To Believe In Evolution, That Person Is Ignorant, Stupid Or Insane (or Wicked, But I'd Rather Not Consider That).

Nowadays Theologians Aren't Quite So Straightforward As Paley. They Don't Point To Complex Living Mechanisms And Say That They Are Self-evidently Designed By A Creator, Just Like A Watch. But There Is A Tendency To Point To Them And Say 'it Is Impossible To Believe' That Such Complexity, Or Such Perfection, Could Have Evolved By Natural Selection. Whenever I Read Such A Remark, I Always Feel Like Writing 'speak For Yourself' In The Margin.

If It's Really True, That The Museum At Liberty University Has Dinosaur Fossils Which Are Labelled As Being 3000 Years Old, Then That Is An Educational Disgrace. It Is Debauching The Whole Idea Of A University, And I Would Strongly Encourage Any Members Of Liberty University Who May Be Here To Leave And Go To A Proper University.

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.

Atheism Is Not A Religion. Abstinence Is Not A Sex Position.

My Mind Is Open To The Most Wonderful Range Of Future Possibilities, Which I Cannot Even Dream About.

Trending Author

Laurence J. Peter

Holbrook Jackson

Agnetha Faltskog

Category