Γιατί πιστεύουμε | Why We Believe
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«We are human, therefore we believe.» [p. ix]
«Humans are neither accident nor miracle, and the explanation of who and why we are is an amazingly complex, dynamic, enticing [γοητευτική], and unfinished story. It is a story in which belief is central, as both an outcome and a cause.» [p. xi]
«Unlike most evolutionary narratives, the one I present ties the explanation of humanity to our distinctive capacity for belief.» [pp. xi-xii]
«How we became so significant is one of the most important questions facing humanity. Our capacity for belief is a major part of the answer.» [p. 3]
«Believing is completely real but often without material substance. And most critically, undergirding and infusing belief [η ενισχυμένη και ενσταλλαγμένη πεποίθηση] is the human capacity to imagine, to be creative, to hope and dream, and to infuse the world with meaning.» [p. xii]
«The human capacity for belief is not only about religion, spirituality, ritual, or some notion of the supernatural.» [p. xii]
«Religious belief is a major element in the human story.» [p. xiii]
«Meaning, imagination, and hope, which constitute our capacity for belief, are as central to the human story as bones, genes, and ecologies.» [p. xiii]
«This activity, the primate way of being in the world, is social through and through. The deep roots of primate sociality are a key source of the human capacity to believe.» [p. 6]
«That additional piece is primates’ ability to have an aesthetic sense and the experience of awe [εμπειρία του δέους] — critically necessary for the development of transcendent experience.» [p. 9]
«Humans are mammals, primates, and hominins [Ανθρωπογονικοί] , but we are also something distinct. We can philosophize about our place in the world and share it with one another. We can experience existential crises, and we regularly assume that certain aspects of life include a transcendent component. Even an evolutionary explanation of what makes us human, therefore, must share some connection to these distinctive facts of humanity. Such considerations are mainstays [crucial or key parts, pillars] of many philosophical and theological explanations for what makes us human, but those explanations largely draw on other sources of knowledge than evolutionary science. An evolutionary description of human distinctiveness has to include a measurable or otherwise discretely identifiable set of parameters that reliably classify different clusters [groups] of beings.» [p. 19-20]