Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

Dawkins goes on to say, “Living organisms had existed on earth without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin . . . who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible to give a sensible answer to the curious child . . . [who asks] ‘Why are people?’ [i.e., What is man’s purpose in life?]. . . . We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and we would be better off if we ignored them completely.’”