I A common rhetorical move made by contemporary proponents of atheism is to remind their audiences of the size and scope of the universe. Richard Dawkins, for example, in Unweaving the Rainbow, points out that, if we could write the history of a year on a single sheet of paper, so that a book the size of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations would take us back to Queen Elizabeth I, we would need a bookshelf of history volumes stretching for hundreds of miles in order to write the history of the universe. The point is to impress upon readers the…
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