I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
I don’t think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
