This is a picture of Earth. Yes. If you look very carefully and closely, you’d see it. Just below the center line, on the right side, bathed in sunbeam. Yes, it’s that speck of dust.
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
http://gemssty.com/2006/10/02/92/
“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us, loud and clear, and I must say that these are basically Darwin’s views: there are no gods, no purposive forces of any kind, no life after death (when I die I am absolutely certain that I’m gonna be completely dead, that’s just all, that’s gonna be the end of me), there is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans either … The question is, ‘Can atheistic humanism offer us very much?’ Well sure, it can give you intellectual satisfaction, and I’m a heck of a lot more intellectually satisfied now that I don’t have to cling to the fairytales that I believed when I was a kid. So life may have no ultimate meaning but I sure think it can have lots of proximate meaning.” William Provine, professor of the history of science at Cornell University: (From a debate with Phillip Johnson: http://creation.com/atheism
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