The Magic of Reality

by Richard Dawkins

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.

Other charlatans exploit people who are grieving, by claiming to be able to make contact with the dead. When this happens it is no longer just fun or entertainment, but preying on people’s gullibility and distress.

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet.

Natural selection nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival. The genes that survive in a gene pool are the genes that are good at surviving. And what makes a gene good at surviving? It helps other genes to build bodies that are good at surviving and reproducing: bodies that survive long enough to pass on the genes that helped them to survive.

And it is important to recognize when we reach the limits of what we understand. It is not that we shall never understand these things. Probably we shall, and scientists are working on them with every hope of success. But we have to know what we don’t understand, and admit it to ourselves, before we can begin to work on it.

Scientists now have evidence that an even larger meteor hit Yucatán, in what is now Central America, 65 million years ago, causing a global disaster, which is probably what killed off the dinosaurs. It has been calculated that the energy released by this catastrophic collision was hundreds of times greater than would be released if all the nuclear weapons in the world were simultaneously exploded in Yucatán.

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. We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.

The immune system wins many battles against pre-cancerous cells, suppressing them before they have a chance to become fully malignant. My suggestion is that, in its constant vigilance against pre-cancerous cells, the immune system sometimes goes too far and attacks harmless tissues, attacks the body’s own cells – and we call this an auto-immune disease. Could it be that the explanation of auto-immune diseases is that they are evidence of evolution’s work-in-progress on an effective weapon against cancer?

If present-day science encounters an observation, or an experimental result, that it cannot explain, then we should not rest until we have improved our science so that it can provide an explanation. If it requires a radically new kind of science, a revolutionary science so strange that old scientists scarcely recognize it as science at all, that’s fine too. It’s happened before. But don’t ever be lazy enough – defeatist enough, cowardly enough – to say ‘It must be supernatural’ or ‘It must be a miracle’.

The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.