I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

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.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.