The Magic of Reality

by Richard Dawkins

For reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.

We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

Science thrives on its inability – so far – to explain everything, and uses that as the spur to go on asking questions, creating possible models and testing them, so that we make our way, inch by inch, closer to the truth.

The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural – caused by gods (both happy and angry), demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells – actually do have natural explanations:

Darwin saw that the whole thing would happen naturally, as a matter of course, for the simple reason that some individuals survive long enough to breed and others don’t; and those that survive do so because they are better equipped than others.

Quite often we meet different versions of the same myth. That’s not surprising, because people often change details while telling tales around the camp fire, so local versions of the stories drift apart.

This may surprise you, but there never was a first person – because every person had to have parents, and those parents had to be people too! Same with rabbits. There never was a first rabbit, never was a first crocodile, never a first dragonfly. Every creature ever born belonged to the same species as its parents

you’d only have to go back six million years to find the most recent shared grancestor of all humans and chimpanzees. That’s recent enough for us to guess at a possible geographical barrier that might have occasioned the original split. It’s been suggested that it was the Great Rift Valley in Africa, with humans evolving on the east side and chimpanzees on the west.

Evolution means change in a gene pool. Change in a gene pool means that some genes become more numerous, others less. Genes that used to be common become rare, or disappear altogether. Genes that used to be rare become common. And the result is that the shape, or size, or colour, or behaviour of typical members of the species changes: it evolves, because of changes in the numbers of genes in the gene pool. That is what evolution is.

Natural selection nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival.

when scientists can’t see something directly, they propose a ‘model’ of what it might be like, and then they test that model.

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye – and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all!

the stories in holy books don’t contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them!

Many myths and legends from all around the world have the same odd feature: a particular incident happens once, and then, for reasons never explained, the same thing goes on happening again and again for ever.

There is good evidence that some of our most vivid memories are actually false memories. And false memories can be deliberately planted by unscrupulous ‘therapists’.

Normally, when you are asleep and dreaming, your body is paralysed. I suppose it’s to stop your muscles working in tune with your dreams and making you sleepwalk (though this does, of course, sometimes happen). And normally, when you wake and your dream vanishes, the paralysis goes and you can move your muscles. But occasionally there is a delay between your mind returning to consciousness and your muscles coming back to life, and that is called sleep paralysis.

Even questions can be enough to implant or cement a false memory.

One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don’t know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don’t know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.

There is much that remains deeply mysterious, and it is not likely that we will ever uncover all the secrets of a universe as vast as ours: but, armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them.

Real life is different. Bad things do happen, and they happen to good people as well as bad.

The truth, of course, is that there is noise going on most of the time, but we only notice it when it is an irritation, as when it interferes with filming. There is a bias in our likelihood of noticing annoyance, and this makes us think the world is out to annoy us deliberately.

those individual animals that act as though Sod’s Law were true are more likely to survive and reproduce than those individual animals that follow Pollyanna’s Law.

People who would laugh at the idea that a pumpkin could turn into a coach, and who know perfectly well that silk handkerchiefs don’t really turn into rabbits, are quite happy to believe that a prophet turned water into wine or, as devotees of another religion would have it, flew to heaven on a winged horse.

Humans are social animals, the human brain is pre-programmed to see the faces of other humans even where there aren’t any. This is why people so often see faces in the random patterns made by clouds, or on slices of toast, or in damp patches on walls.

The key point is that we only bother to tell stories when strange coincidences happen – not when they don’t.

Nobody ever says, ‘Last night I dreamed about that uncle I haven’t thought of for years, and then I woke up and found that he hadn’t died in the night!’

Let’s put Hume’s point into other words. If John tells you a miracle story, you should believe it only if it would be even more of a miracle for it to be a lie (or a mistake, or an illusion).

If you claim that anything odd must be ‘supernatural’ you are not just saying you don’t currently understand it; you are giving up and saying that it can never be understood.

The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.