By RICHARD DAWKINS - WASHINGTON POST ON FAITH
Updated: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:41:47 UTC

See link at the end for the Polish translation
March 24th is a landmark date for Washington, D.C. Thousands will converge on the world’s leading capital city to celebrate the crowning human virtue of reason.

How have we come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what’s true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.

Reason, as played out in the grand cooperative enterprise called science, makes me proud of Homo sapiens. Sapiens literally means ‘wise,’ but we have deserved the accolade only since we crawled from the swamp of primitive superstition and supernatural gullibility and embraced reason, logic, science and evidence-based truth.

We now know the age of our universe (13-14 billion years), the age of the Earth (4-5 billion years), what we and all other objects are made of (atoms), where we come from (evolved from other species), why all species are so well adapted to their environments (natural selection of their DNA). We know why we have night and day (Earth spins like a top), why we have winter and summer (Earth is tilted), what is the maximum speed at which anything can travel (two thirds of a billion mph). We know what the sun is (one star among billions in the Milky Way galaxy), we know what the Milky Way is (one galaxy among billions in our universe). We understand what causes smallpox (a virus, which we have eradicated), polio (a virus, which we have nearly eradicated), malaria (a protozoan, still here but we’re working on it), syphilis, tuberculosis, gangrene, cholera (bacteria and we know how to kill them). We have built planes that can cross the Atlantic in hours, rockets that safely land men on the moon and robot vehicles on Mars, and might one day save our planet by diverting a meteor of the kind that - we now understand - killed the dinosaurs. Thanks to evidence-based reason we are blessedly liberated from ancient fears of ghosts and devils, evil spirits and djinns, magic spells and witches’ curses.

Who then would rally against reason? The following statements will sound all too familiar.

Read on

Kto protestowałby przeciwko rozumowi?

Autor tekstu: Richard Dawkins
Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

24 marca będzie doniosłym dniem w Waszyngtonie. Tysiące zbiorą się w tej wiodącej stolicy świata, żeby uczcić szczytowy przymiot człowieka — rozum.

Jak doszliśmy do punktu, w którym potrzebny jest wiec dla obrony rozumu? Oparcie życia na rozumie oznacza oparcie go na dowodach i logice. Dowody to jedyny sposób odkrycia prawdy o rzeczywistym świecie. Logika jest sposobem, w jaki wnioskujemy o konsekwencjach wypływających z dowodów. Kto mógłby być przeciwko temu? Niestety, wielu ludzi, i dlatego potrzebujemy Wiecu Rozumu.

Czytaj dalej

TAGGED: REASON, RICHARD DAWKINS