I’m reading a Richard Dawkins book from the last decade, and now and then he leaves a gold nugget on the trail – a little truth he’s boiled down to an essence.

For example –

•     An inability to prove the existence of something does not make its existence a 50-50 proposition.  In fact, the inability to prove the existence of something has no bearing on the probability of its existence.

•     The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.

Truths like these – variations on the idea of Occam’s razor I suppose – are like paring knives for whittling away the spoiled meat from the fruit salad of unfounded theories and hack philosophies so prevalent today.