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,… - John Dupré

And that is the real force of my earlier insistence on empiricism. My brand of empiricism does not insist that we must have fully compelling grounds for the things we believe, or indeed that we can find totally irresistible grounds for anything much beyond the immediate and banal. It insists only that we have some reason for the things we believe and that we decline to believe those things for which we have no reasons. A modest requirement, perhaps, but one that would dispose, I contend, with a large part of the religious and superstitious mythologies that continue to dominate and sometimes devastate human lives.

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.

I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problematic to offer as a sufficient reason for belief the suggestion that one would be better off believing it. This is generally described as wishful thinking.