Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

by Richard Dawkins

Science really matters for life – and by ‘science’ I mean not just scientific facts, but the scientific way of thinking.

Gut feelings, even when they don’t arise from the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth.

We must have the courage to admit that we start in an ethical vacuum; that we invent our own values.

There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such thing as objective reality. We make our own reality.

But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.

Private revelation doesn’t sit well with the textbook ideals of scientific method: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, and independence of cultural milieu.

Our planet is a lonely speck in a great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

‘Pro-lifers’ assert, without question, that life is infinitely precious, while cheerfully tucking into a large steak. The sort of ‘life’ that such people are ‘pro’ is all too clearly human life. Now, this is not necessarily wrong, but the evolutionary scientist will, at very least, warn us of inconsistency. It is not self-evident that abortion of a one-month human foetus is murder, while shooting a fully sentient adult elephant or mountain gorilla is not.

Nature, fortunately or unfortunately, is indifferent to anything so parochial as human values.

think it is quite plausible that we are genetically programmed to be afraid of heights and sharp points, but that we have to learn (and are not very good at) being afraid of travelling at high speeds.

We can all sit down together and work out the values we want to follow. Whether we are talking about four-thousand-year-old parchment scrolls, or four-thousand-million-year-old DNA, we are all entitled to throw off the tyranny of the texts.

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature

Don’t the Belsen-bound railway wagons come, unwelcome, to mind when you drive behind one of those closed-in trucks with bewildered, fearful eyes peering through the ventilation slats?

more people are alive today than have died since the dawn of recorded history.