We Live In A World That Is

I Don't Think The 9/11 Attacks Taught Us Anything We Didn't Already Know About Religion. It Has Long Been Obvious - Even To The Deeply Religious - That Religious Fanaticism Is An Extremely Dangerous Deranger Of Otherwise Sane And Goodhearted People.

Highly Technical Philosophical Arguments Of The Sort Many Philosophers Favor Are Absent Here. That Is Because I Have A Prior Problem To Deal With. I Have Learned That Arguments, No Matter How Watertight, Often Fall On Deaf Ears. I Am Myself The Author Of Arguments That I Consider Rigorous And Unanswerable But That Are Often Not Such Much Rebutted Or Even Dismissed As Simply Ignored.

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.

There Are No Forces On This Planet More Dangerous To All Of Us Than The Fanaticisms Of Fundamentalism.

Wherever There Is A Design That Is Highly Successful In A Broad Range Of Similar Environments, It Is Apt To Emerge Again And Again, Independently - The Phenomenon Known In Biology As Convergent Evolution. I Call These Designs 'good Tricks.'