Richard Dawkins em "The God Delusion" (2006). Excerto maior aqui."Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination. Children who have imaginary friends sometimes see them clearly, exactly as if they were real. If we are gullible, we don’t recognise hallucination or lucid dreaming for what it is and we claim to have seen or heard a ghost; or an angel; or God; or — especially if we happen to be young, female and Catholic — the Virgin Mary. Such visions and manifestations are certainly not good grounds for believing that ghosts or angels, gods or virgins, are actually there. On the face of it mass visions, such as the report that 70,000 pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun “tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude”, are harder to write off. It is not easy to explain how 70,000 people could share the same hallucination. But it is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the ...

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