Philosophy Is The Childhood Of The Intellect,

Life May Be Not Only Meaningless But Absurd.

It Is Prima Facie Highly Implausible That Life As We Know It Is The Result Of A Sequence Of Physical Accidents Together With The Mechanism Of Natural Selection.

Equally Real At All Stages Of His Life; Specifically, The Fact That A Particular Stage Is Present Cannot Be Regarded As Conferring On It Any Special Status.

I Want Atheism To Be True And Am Made Uneasy By The Fact That Some Of The Most Intelligent And Well-informed People I Know Are Religious Believers. It Isn't Just That I Don't Believe In God And, Naturally, I Hope That I'm Right In My Belief. It's That I Hope There Is No God! I Don't Want There To Be A God; I Don't Want The Universe To Be Like That.

Once We Have Taken The Backward Step To An Abstract View Of Our Whole System Of Beliefs, Evidence, And Justification, And Seen That It Works Only, Despite Its Pretensions, By Taking The World Largely For Granted, We Are Not In A Position To Contrast All These Appearances With An Alternative Reality. We Cannot Shed Our Ordinary Responses, And If We Could It Would Leave Us With No Means Of Conceiving A Reality Of Any Kind.