To whichever little group we happen to be born, we owe passionate love and loyalty. Members of other groups are beneath contempt, deserving of rejection and hostility. That both groups are of the same species, that to an outside observer there virtually indistinguishable makes no difference. This is certainly the pattern among the chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. This way of viewing the world may have made enormous evolutionary sense a few million years ago. However dangerous it has become today. We lack consensus about our place in the universe. There is no generally agreed upon long-term vision of the goal of our species, other than perhaps simple survival. Especially when times are hard, we become desperate for encouragement, unresceptive to the litany of great demotions and dashed hopes, and much more willing to hear that we're special, never mind if the evidence is paper thin. A principle of mediocrity seems to apply to all our circumstances. We would not have known beforehand that the evidence would be so repeatedly and thoroughly incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the universe. But what is the alternative? Obdurably to pretend to certainty in an uncertain world? To adopt a comforting belief system no matter how out of kilter with the facts it is? If we don't know what's real, how can we deal with reality? For practical reasons we can't live too much in fantasy land. Shall we censor one another's religions and burn down one another's places of worship? How can we be sure which of the thousands of human belief systems should become unchallenged? Eubiquitous mandatory. Let's contradict one another. On small matters such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and estu pork or the other way around? All the way to the most central issues such as whether there are no gods, one god, or many gods. Science has taken away our religion, he laments. And what sort of religion is it that he longs for? One in which quote, the human race was the point, the heart, the final cause of the whole system. It placed ourselves definitely upon the universal map. We were the end, the purpose, the rational axle around which the great ethereum shells rotated. All terror asked, why is there anything? Einstein's formulation was to ask, with a god had any choice in creating the universe. But if the universe is infinitely old, if the big bang some 15 billion years ago is only the most recent cusp in an infinite series of cosmic contractions and expansions, then it was never created, and the question of why it is as it is is rendered meaningless. It almost seems that the scientist is getting some weird satisfaction out of putting humans down. Why can't they find a way in which we're superior? Lift our spirits, and solve us. In such debates, science with its mantra of discouragement feels cold and remote, dispassionate, detached. Unresponsive to human needs. And again, if we're not important, not central, not the apple of God's eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes, since he has discovered that he inhabits nothing but a very obscure corner of the universe instead of the central world around which sun, moon and stars alike revolved. There can be no doubt that man may feel himself, and has often felt himself, a great deal too insignificant to be the object of any particular divine training or care. If the earth be regarded as a sort of antel, and the life and death of human beings as the life and death of so many ants, which run into and out of so many holes in such a food and sunlight, it is quite certain that no adequate importance will be attached to the duties of human life. And that a profound fatalism and hopelessness instead of new hopefulness will attach to human effort.