Obviously enough, we cannot decide what evolution entails without a fairly sharp conception of what it is. - John Dupré

My point is not to claim that science has told us everything important about the world, that there are no longer any mysteries yet to be discovered, or even that science can ever tell us everything we would like to know. I have no doubt that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. My point is rather that we know enough to accept our ignorance. We have enough idea of how we can, sometimes, find out even quite profound truths about the world we inhabit that we should no longer be satisfied with mythologies that are made up from sheer ignorance.

One commonly held ideal of a possible good life is one spent in adoration of or service to the Supreme Being. It is hard to believe that the value of such a life is independent of whether there is, in fact, any such being to adore or serve. In sum, how we should live is a question that cannot be wholly separated from facts about how things are.

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.