Transport yourself back in time six hundred years. Look up into the sky and see the sun. You don't know what it is but you know it gives off huge amounts of heat and light—enough to warm and illuminate the entire planet.

As you gaze at this celestial monster there is one thing you are sure of—something as powerful as that and so essential for human life could not have happened by accident—it must have had a designer. A designer who created it and put it in the perfect orbit to give the exact amount heat and the exact amount of day and night necessary to sustain all living things on Earth. At that moment, you fall to your knees and thank your god (whichever god you happened to believe in).
...

Returning to the 21st century, we have moved on. We understand our sun very well indeed. We know its chemistry and the physics that formed it and sustains it. We understand how it formed, how long it will live, how it will change over its lifetime and how it will die. And we know all of that is caused by natural, unguided processes.

We have learned so much in the intervening years that there are only a few deep mysteries remaining, such as the origin of life and the cause of the Big Bang.

But one thing has not changed. Still billions of people assume their gods are responsible for things they don't understand. It is wise to learn from history rather than repeat it. Don't be on your knees when the true origin of life is finally discovered. Get up, brush yourself off, and withhold belief until we actually know how it happened.

After all, trousers are valuable, and so is your dignity.

Viewing from a distance can often reveal things that cannot be seen close up. To gain a sense of perspective, it is interesting to look at our species, not for a few generations but for our entire existence.

The best evidence available suggests our species has roamed the earth for at least 200,000 years, probably more. Most of that time we were itinerant hunter-gatherers. We used sharpened sticks and flaked stones as tools and weapons.

Things changed very slowly indeed for our Stone Age ancestors until about 12,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. That was when we started to grow our own food which forced us into permanent settlements, and gave rise to much larger communities.

An unintended consequence of the agricultural revolution was that people could own land and charge rent and leaders could levy taxes. So, we saw the emergence of a tier of wealthy property owners and rulers.

The next big change, starting just over 5,000 years ago, was the discovery of bronze. Smelting copper and tin produced a metal that could be forged into tools and weapons and were far superior to their stone equivalents.

The invention of bronze tools for cutting wood paved the way, around 4,000 years ago, for one of the most important inventions of all time—the wheel.

And soon after this came the invention of writing and mathematics.

Bronze was a ground-breaking invention but it was a relatively soft metal and sharpened blades blunted very quickly. But some 3,200 years ago we discovered how to smelt iron and the Iron Age was born.

There were more revolutions to come but the foundations for our modern society were almost in place 3,000 years ago with the inventions of agriculture, the wheel, writing, mathematics and iron. Just one more foundation stone was required and it took another 2,000 years. That was the invention of science, which started with Thales' extraordinary idea that everything that happened could have a natural explanation and culminated in a reliable process for investigating natural things, now known as the scientific method.

Now for the perspective. For at least 94% of the time our species has existed, we have been Stone Age hunter gatherers. For more than 99.5% of our time here we had no reliable method for understanding our world and we relied on gods, magic, stars and superstition.

In the 0.5% of our time on Earth since then, we have been through the industrial revolution and we have started our journey through the information revolution. We have walked on the moon, sent craft to the outer reaches of our solar system and created machines that can look back in time to the beginning of the universe, more than 13 billion years ago.

We can travel to any place on Earth in less than a day and can talk to people on the other side of the planet, as though they were in the same room. We have eradicated diseases, like smallpox, that used to kill three million people yearly and we can transplant failed organs to repair people who would otherwise die.

All these advances, from the industrial revolution onwards, have relied on science. Not a single advance has been given to us by the gods, magic, stars or superstition that our ancestors relied on for hundreds of millennia.

We must not forget that we are not just related to those Stone Age men and women from 200,000 years ago—we ARE those people. We are the same species, made of the same stuff and to the same design. We have evolved slightly over those years but negligible changes have occurred in the last 1,000 years. We could still mate with one of our Stone Age ancestors and produce viable offspring.

This perspective may explain why, after the scientific approach has thoroughly proven itself and gods, magic, stars and superstition have been equally thoroughly discredited, that 85% of us still want to believe that gods, magic, stars and superstition are real and valuable. They are not.

That is our inner caveman speaking. It's time to let him go.

When I hear atheists saying people have to be stupid to believe in God, I am reminded of Christians who say you can't have morals without God.

Both statements are crass because the evidence is abundant. There are plenty of atheists with high moral values and plenty of smart people who believe in God.

So, either way, a married person is indeed looking at an unmarried person. We have sufficient information to determine that a married person is looking at an unmarried person, but not which couple this applies to.