# Quote — Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

> The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

- Author: [Steven Pinker](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker.md)
- Book: [How the Mind Works](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker/how-the-mind-works.md)
- Page: 560
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker#How_the_Mind_Works_(1997)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker/how-the-mind-works/the-problem-with

## More from this book

> Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to.

p. 499 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker/how-the-mind-works/status-is-the.md)

> Humans . . . entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires. . . . People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.

p. 188 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker/how-the-mind-works/humans-entered-the.md)

> Stripped to its essentials, every decision in life amounts to choosing which lottery ticket to buy. . . . Most organisms don't buy lottery tickets, but they all choose between gambles every time their bodies can move in more than one way. They should be willing to 'pay' for information---in tissue, energy, and time---if the cost is lower than the expected payoff in food, safety, mating opportunities, and other resources, all ultimately valuated in the expected number of surviving offspring. In multicellular animals the information is gathered and translated into profitable decisions by the nervous system.

p. 175 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/steven-pinker/how-the-mind-works/stripped-to-its.md)