Sometimes on my lunch hour I'll drive over to the Durham library, just to get out of the office. I still have a Durham library card, but technically I don't think I can use it since we're not residents there anymore. That's a shame, because I keep stumbling on good books there. On my last visit I discovered Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not a Christian." He cuts up the religion pretty lucidly, though his arguments lack Mark Twain's outrage. Two points in particular struck me, from his discussion of the argument from design. Here's the first:

You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

That's true, of course, but the reason it struck me is that it seems to belie the anthropic principle, an almost mystical concept from cosmology and exobiology that says the universe sort of must have been created to accommodate us. I never could quite understand that reasoning—of course we find ourselves in a hospitable universe; where else could we find ourselves? But smarter people than I seem to accept it. I wonder how they'd respond to Russell's arguments.

Here's the other quote:

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the splendor of those people. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I also found Bruce Sterling's Tomorrow Now, in which he takes a stab at predicting the next 50 years. The local Raleigh library purports to have that, but it ain't on the shelf. I'll keep checking.