Every truth can be found again, as many times as you like, and it is the same every time. But every lie dies with its followers, can never be found again if it is forgotten and no two are the same.

@Fernapple Ricky Gervais said it well.

@Betty The idea of destroying all our scientific knowledge and starting over is scary. And once it's gone, there's no guarantee that it takes "only" a thousand years to get it back. Maybe it takes ten thousand years. We could literally bomb ourselves into the stone age.

@Flyingsaucesir Yes, but the loss of all scientific knowledge in this case is only hypothetical, to show the difference with religion. I certainly hope that it will not happen in reality.

@Fernapple @Flyingsaucesir @Betty We are at least as temporary as any other species, and probably more so. The understanding of time is relative, so we live a long life that lasts an eyeblink.

@racocn8 Yup, our whole planet is a speck of dust in the cosmos, and our lives but a momentary glow.

@Flyingsaucesir Yes the point in part being, that as R. Dawkins put it. If we were ever to be contacted by aliens from another planet, then we would probably find that their evolutionary theory was exactly the same as ours, but their religions, if they had any, would be quite different. To which he then added the joke. "Unless of course. The alien visitor is their Darwin, and we are her Galapagos."

I think that Darwin chose the "wonderful " word, because it is neutral in moral and humane terms, since something may be, for example, wonderfully awful. ( Using awful in the negative sense which, I think you mean, though it is a modern usage that probably did not exist in Darwin's day. Awful originally meaning only raising awe, or pretty much the same as wonderful today. )

Which raises the interesting issue of whether, beautiful too, can be neutral in humane and moral terms, and whether it should have a different usage when referring to things like scientific proofs. As in we do not find parasites attractive, yet you could, in theory, have a beautiful proof about their behaviour. Whether, evolution as a theory, could be said to be beautiful, in the way that the mechanism of mutation plus natural selection works to produce complex things, even if those things such as diseases which are repulsive to us. As in, it is a beautiful, and remarkable development that the malaria parasite, was provided with a way to use mosquitoes to infect mammals. Even though we do not see it as good for us, in human terms.