The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?