I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problem… - John Dupré

Whatever the unique features of humans may be, there are realms of behaviour for which the similarities between ourselves and our near relatives are too great for it to be credible that in one case the behaviour reflects an underlying soul or mind, while in the other there is no such thing, only the grinding away of neural machinery.

Darwin and his intellectual descendants have provided us with fundamental insight into the nature of the world we live in and of our place within it, a contribution to our basic metaphysics. It is still widely supposed that this is the sort of thing that should come from philosophers or even theologians. In this case, at any rate, the insight has come from biology and I, as a philosopher, am happy just to do my best to interpret it. The theologians, I have suggested, can be less complacent about this insight, and may even need to retrain for a discipline with a subject matter with stronger claims to existence.

Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it.