for any civilization capable of broadcasting a signal oversuch an immense distance is likely to be greatly superior to ours.Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at the timeof transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us tocalculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time themessage reaches us (unless they have driven themselves extinct,which is not unlikely).
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like agnosticism of the permanent and irrevocable kind, full-blownPAP. It implies that science cannot even make probability judge-ments on the question. This remarkably widespread fallacy - manyrepeat it like a mantra but few of them, I suspect, have thought itthrough - embodies what I refer to as 'the poverty of agnosticism'.
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The fact that I cannot know whether your red isthe same as my green doesn't make the probability 50 per cent. Theproposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a prob-ability. Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meetagain, to leap from the premise that the question of God's existenceis in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence andhis non-existence are equiprobable.
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Later in his speech, Huxley went on to explain that agnostics haveno creed, not even a negative one. Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. . . . Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.
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The view that I shall defend is verydifferent: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly inthe temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It isa scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and mean-while we can say something pretty strong about the probability.
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The robust Muscular Christian haranguing us from the pulpit ofmy old school chapel admitted a sneaking regard for atheists. Theyat least had the courage of their misguided convictions. What thispreacher couldn't stand was agnostics: namby-pamby, mushy pap,weak-tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters.
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So is James Madison's robust anti-clericalism: 'During almost fifteen centuries has the legalestablishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been itsfruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy;ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotryand persecution.'
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Anothersuggestion stems from the observation that America is a nation ofimmigrants. A colleague points out to me that immigrants,uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family inEurope, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researchingfurther.
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I am aware that critics of religion can be attacked for failing tocredit the fertile diversity of traditions and world-views that havebeen called religious. Anthropologically informed works, from SirJames Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explainedor Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document thebizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such booksand marvel at the richness of human gullibility.
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Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, theywere not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey thecharacteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which - unlikescience or most other branches of human scholarship - has notmoved on in eighteen centuries.
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Historians of religion recognize a progression fromprimitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of theGreeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheism
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The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasantcharacter 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, fili-cidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciouslymalevolent bully.
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I shalldefine the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed andcreated the universe and everything in it, including us.
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This bookwill advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence onlyas the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in theuniverse, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
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Here's another weird example of the privileging of religion. On21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a8 church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, whicheverybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenicdrugs. Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniaodo Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinkinghoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyl-tryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drugenhances their understanding.
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Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation fromEinstein himself: 'To sense that behind anything that can be experi-enced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whosebeauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeblereflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.'
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So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: 'I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings'?
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Let's remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of cre- ating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non- supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
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ecumenical
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He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned.
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terrible and frightening label.
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nineteenth century, when John Stuart Mill was already able to say: 'The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.'
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Chapters 1 and 10 top and tail the book by explaining, in their different ways, how a proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately - usurped.
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There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word 'atheist' has been assiduously built up as a
The God Delusion On page 12 November 5, 2012
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagineno suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts,no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinianwars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jewsas 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honourkillings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecinggullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till ithurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues,
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