Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Darwin and the big questions
- Part I Darwin gets religion
- Part II Life after Darwin
- 8 Human beings and their place in the universe
- 9 The status of human beings among the animals
- 10 Meaning of life, RIP?
- Part III Morality stripped of superstition
- Suggestions for further reading
- References
- Index
8 - Human beings and their place in the universe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Darwin and the big questions
- Part I Darwin gets religion
- Part II Life after Darwin
- 8 Human beings and their place in the universe
- 9 The status of human beings among the animals
- 10 Meaning of life, RIP?
- Part III Morality stripped of superstition
- Suggestions for further reading
- References
- Index
Summary
The fact that we are the contingent end-products of a natural process of evolution, rather than the special creation of a good God, in His own image, has to be just about the most profound thing we humans have discovered about ourselves.
Michael Ruse (1986), p. xiLet us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology … anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species.
E. O. Wilson (1975), p. 547Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.
Mark Twain, 1903, cited in Twain (1992), p. 576Breaking down the walls
Science has turned our view of ourselves and the world we live in upside down and inside out. People living today – even those with little formal education – have a radically different view of the nature of the universe than their counterparts in earlier centuries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Darwin, God and the Meaning of LifeHow Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew, pp. 141 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010