Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow

"I want to feel my sense of awe sparked, want to be captivated, want to be reminded of the breathtaking fortune of living in such an interesting universe." That was Anthony Doerr in his Boston Globe review. The God Delusion, as he rightly said, doesn't achieve this. To do so, it would have to be a different book. It might be called Unweaving the Rainbow. In fact it was.

Doerr's words reminded me that I once put together a brief extract from Unweaving the Rainbow, with the thought that it might be suitable for reading at funerals - including my own when the time comes.

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century.' The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century's being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder."

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[psycho3968]

'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' -Carl Sagan.

[badmovebaker]

*goosebumps*

[blindedby2monkeys]

1 person fucked off

[JahJah920]

Atheists cant deliver the goods? What are we supposed to deliver? Denying outrageous claims that have no evidence to support them is all we do. Gods or deities are all claimed by theists without evidence. Atheists simply say no, I will not accept the assumption of a deity when there is absolutely no evidence. Its up to you, and other theist to deliver the goods, after all, you are the ones who claim to have the answers.

[TakkunBingo]

Antithesis*

[TakkunBingo]

Natural selection doesn't select traits based upon what size the animal is or any such nonsense, natural selection chooses genes that aid in the survival and reproduction of the animal so those genes can be passed on to the next generation, also atheism shouldnt be expected to deliver any goods, atheism invites doubt of religious dogma not an anteth

[TakkunBingo]

Natural se

[Mossinator5000Deluxe]

@AlainG80 yep, Pteradactyles had 40 foot wingspans, but evolution can't evolve wings big enough for a horse. Drivel...

[Mossinator5000Deluxe]

@AlainG80 you believe in Teridactiles, but something as big as a horse evolving wings, absurd.

[Mossinator5000Deluxe]

@AlainG80 it's people like me that write textbooks so lamen like you have a basic idea how complex things actually work. We dumb it down for you. Next.