richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 361
rhetoric rather than logic. I've done it before, and so have many
others including, to name only recent examples, Carl Sagan in Pale
Blue Dot, E. 0. Wilson in Biophilia, Michael Shermer in The Soul
of Science and Paul Kurtz in Affirmations. In Unweaving the
Rainbow I tried to convey how lucky we are to be alive, given that
the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by
the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. For
those of us lucky enough to be here, I pictured the relative brevity
of life by imagining a laser-thin spotlight creeping along a gigantic
ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in
the darkness of the dead past, or the darkness of the unknown
future. We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight.
However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place? As many atheists have
said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life
should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly
life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time
never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the
whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
Emily Dickinson said,
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
If the demise of God will leave a gap, different people will fill it
in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the
honest and systematic endeavour to find out the truth about the
real world. I see the human effort to understand the universe as a
model-building enterprise. Each of us builds, inside our head, a
model of the world in which we find ourselves. The minimal model
of the world is the model our ancestors needed in order to survive
in it. The simulation software was constructed and debugged by
natural selection, and it is most adept in the world familiar to our
ancestors on the African savannah: a three-dimensional world of
medium-sized material objects, moving at medium speeds relative
to one another. As an unexpected bonus, our brains turn out to be