Human Freedom Is Not An

My Faith In The Expertise Of Physicists Like Richard Feynman, For Instance, Permits Me To Endorse—and, If It Comes To It, Bet Heavily On The Truth Of—a Proposition That I Don't Understand. So Far, My Faith Is Not Unlike Religious Faith, But I Am Not In The Slightest Bit Motivated To Go To My Death Rather Than Recant The Formulas Of Physics. Watch: E Doesn't Equal Mc2, It Doesn't, It Doesn't! I Was Lying, So There!

Every Living Thing Is, From The Cosmic Perspective, Incredibly Lucky Simply To Be Alive. Most, 90 Percent And More, Of All The Organisms That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Viable Offspring, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, Going Back To The Dawn Of Life On Earth, Suffered That Normal Misfortune. You Spring From An Unbroken Line Of Winners.

Now That Mobile Phones And The Internet Have Altered The Epistemic Selective Landscape In A Revolutionary Way, Every Religious Organisation Must Scramble To Evolve Defences Or Become Extinct.

Most People In The West Who Say They Believe In God Actually Believe In Belief In God.

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.