We Have Had Plenty Of Atheist Presidents;

The Way Evolution Always Discovers Reasons Is By Retroactive Endorsement.

For More Than A Century, People Have Often Thought That The Conclusion To Draw From Darwin's Vision Is That Homo Sapiens, Our Species - And We're Just Animals Too, We're Just Mammals - That There Is Nothing Morally Special About Us. I Myself Don't Think This Follows At All From Darwin's Vision, But It Is Certainly The Received View In Many Quarters.

In The Beginning, There Were No Reasons; There Were Only Causes. Nothing Had A Purpose, Nothing Has So Much As A Function; There Was No Teleology In The World At All.

The Juvenile Sea Squirt Wanders Through The Sea Searching For A Suitable Rock Or Hunk Of Coral To Cling To And Make Its Home For Life. For This Task, It Has A Rudimentary Nervous System. When It Finds Its Spot And Takes Root, It Doesn't Need Its Brain Anymore So It Eats It!

The Theoretical Fruits Of Deliberate Oversimplification Through Idealization Are Not To Be Denied... Reality In All Its Messy Particularity Is Too Complicated To Theorize About, Taken Straight. The Issue Is, Rather (since Every Idealization Is A Strategic Choice), Which Idealizations Might Really Shed Some Light... Which Will Just Land Us... Diverting Fairy Tales.