Phat writes:
Granted, more intelligence and intelligent species will eventually be found.
For now, however, all theories, beliefs, and speculations originate from one very tiny place in a very large reality. Logically, God need not exist, but what source of creativity do you replace Him with?
I would replace God with billions and billions (thank you, Carl) of curious human minds, freed from superstition and fear, looking up at the stars with a shiver of awe and thinking, "I wonder..." rather than "I worship".
I won't live to see that day, more's the pity.
All the greatest creations of humankind sprang from the secular impulse, the urge to take the world on its own terms and reach an understanding of it; the worst organized excesses of cruelty and destruction were born in the conviction that some "higher truth"--ideological or theological, but mostly theological--justified them.
A sane man who sets out with the premise that the natural world is a book to read and understand does not conclude that the book instructs him to slaughter his fellows when they disagree; a man who starts out with the premise that the natural world is a stage where we are tested and punished or rewarded by the invisible and unknowable cannot arrive at sane conclusions, because he abandoned sanity with his first step.
Without the atheist impulse that is native to our intellects, philosophers would still be trying to count angels on pins, and priests would still be sending scientists into exile or throwing them onto pyres. Philosophy owes whatever relevance it now has to the intellectual foundations of atheism, and organized religions are similarly indebted for whatever moral progress they have made.
Atheists taught the world that the only things that go bump in the night are the things you can see when you turn on the light. If we ever emerge totally from what darkness we still inhabit, it will have been atheists, not theists, who led us there.
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
-Shakespeare
Real things always push back.
-William James
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