Darwinian “cold bath”

"By taking the Darwinian “cold bath, ” and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages – that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose. In principle, the factual state of the universe, whatever it may be, cannot teach us how we should live or what our lives should mean – for these ethical questions of value and meaning belong to such different realms of human life as religion, philosophy, and humanistic study. Nature’s facts can help us to realize a goal once we have made our ethical decisions on other grounds – as the trivial genetic differences among human groups, for example, can help us to understand human unity once we have agreed on the unalienable rights of all people to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Facts are just facts, in all their fascination, their pristine beauty, and, sometimes, their unfortunate necessity (bodily decline and mortality, as the obvious example), and ethical rectitude, or spiritual meaning, reside within other domains of human inquiry."