(Image of Joseph Wright's Le Philosophe faisant un exposé sur le planétaire, 1766. Click to enlarge.)
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory.
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[T]here would be no...churches...if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion.
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Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of "deism," which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs. This compromise was a logical and rational one for its time, and was especially influential among the Philadelphia and Virginia intellectuals, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson....
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[Pierre-Simon de] Laplace (1749-1827)...the brilliant French scientist...took the work of [Isaac] Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum.... [Napoleon Bonaparte] asked to meet Laplace.... [H]e wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the...response, "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.".... [Laplace] simply stated that he didn't need it.And neither do we.... [T]he end of god-worship discloses itself at the moment...when it becomes optional, or only one among many possible beliefs. For the greater part of human existence, it must always be stressed, this "option" did not really exist.... [F]rom the time of Socrates, who was condemned to death for spreading unwholesome skepticism, it was considered ill-advised to emulate his example.... The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent and omniscient deity, or even his prophet.
- Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great, Twelve, 1st ed, p 66-67
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