But beyond the hardware platform we share with apes, we have the image of God stamped in us, enabling us to be a lot more than merely natural.

I don't think I have to tell you that I don't believe in anything you've just said.

To live in accordance with the animal nature is like floating downstream, never struggling to be anything more than a hairless ape and future worm chow.

We are apes, regardless of whether or not that fact makes you uncomfortable; and that is what it is: a fact. The species "Homo sapiens", or human, is a member of the great ape family. We are animals; we are great apes. It is nothing but arrogance to assume that we are in some way "special". We have our intelligence, for sure, just as an elephant has its trunk, a rhinoceros has its horn or as a lion has its mane, and it has certainly proven itself to be highly advantageous, giving us language, culture, art, science, poetry and, yes, even religion and mythology. But our intelligence, like everything else, is a product of evolution. We are a small bud on the tip of a branch in the tree of life, which connects us to every single other species of living thing on Earth, past, present and future. The other branches are our cousins; we share evolutionary ancestors with them, and they have taken different evolutionary paths.

That's the best an atheist can hope for, but Christians have longer-range plans, so our priorities and choices are bound to differ.

The hopes of an atheist are grounded in life, just like the hopes of any other religious persons. We hope that our lives turn out well, we hope that our families and friends will be safe and happy, we hope that our children will be successful, we hope that the world will continue to improve. Some atheists even hope that there is an afterlife. Atheism alone does not preclude such a possibility, and even if it did, it does not preclude the possibility of hope that there might be one. Most atheists, however, admit to the likelihood that upon death of the brain, consciousness is lost forever. We do not, therefore, have false hope that perhaps we will survive the death of ourselves (I say ourselves because we are our physical bodies - we are not some kind of otherworldly beings making matter dance and move like a puppet dangling by some ethereal strings). We do not have false hope that we will meet all those who have died in some afterlife and live happily ever after for all eternity in paradise. We recognize that life is precious, because once it's gone, it's gone forever. We hope that we will use our time wisely, rather than treating it as a waiting room before some great afterlife; we hope that we live on in the memories of our loved ones, our families, our friends, our children; we hope that we can make a difference in the world; we hope that we are fondly remembered.

I will share two quotes, which I believe highlight my point. First, a quote by Ann Dryan, the wife of Carl Sagan:

"When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."

And secondly, by Richard Dawkins, from his book, Unweaving the Rainbow:

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred""