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

Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true.

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.

The limits of a creature’s consciousness are closely related to its particular set of capacities. As I shall elaborate in a moment, language provides us with an extraordinarily enhanced set of capacities, and consequently with an equally enhanced realm of consciousness. Perhaps this should be seen as a case in which a difference of degree amounts to a difference of kind. But if so, it is crucial to remember, from the point of view of evolution, that a difference in kind can be the summation of many small differences of degree.