Today we celebrate Darwin Day, a holiday that is dedicated to anthropology and meant to encourage appreciation of the natural sciences and the study of nature and of our origins. I decided that I’d like to share some verses from philosopher A.C. Grayling’s Good Book: a Humanist Bible, which I read and reviewed in detail over the last few years.

Using Biblical language and editorial style, the Good Book presents a non-supernatural alternative to the Bible. It draws its spirituality and philosophy from humanism rather than religion. The Book of Genesis in Grayling’s Humanist Bible particularly resonates with Epicurean teachings about the nature of things.

Bodies are unions of the primal atoms. And those no power can quench; they live by their own powers, and endure. – Genesis 8:1 All things take their origin from earlier kinds. – Genesis 3:1 All things are body or arise from it; the real is the corporeal, visible and invisible alike. – Genesis 7:3 I am convinced that the human intellect makes its own difficulties, not using the true, sober and judicious methods of inquiry at our disposal, from which comes the manifold ignorance of things which causes innumerable mischiefs in the world. Therefore let us try to see whether that commerce between the human mind and the nature of things, a commerce more precious than anything on earth, for it is nothing less than the search for truth, can be perfected; or if not, yet improved to a better condition than it now displays. – Genesis 14:1-5

Find more quotes on the Good Book Tumblr feed

Darwin and the Planet of the Apes