This article touches the matter with a needle, unconsciously. Mr. Miller has accepted without qualm the modern move from True (which, thanks to a lot of skeptics unworthy to polish Hume's shoes, is no longer even a goal) to Useful. The test of a theory is not its Truth (after all, thanks to Popper, we know that that's not useful, though falsifiability is), but its predictions and their correctness. Of course, by this measure one would, upon being confronted with the Copernican hypothesis, test it, see it fail by a good eight minutes of arc, and return to the revised Ptolemaic system, thank you Tycho Brahe. At least Mr. Miller still believes in a mind.
Moving from True to Useful as a criterion doesn't accomplish anything in any case. The question remains, Useful for what? There may be a Good-in-itself, or a capital-t Truth, but the very idea of use implies a goal other than itself. And one can't get around that by claiming that Useful means preserving life (or Human life, or the Species, or one's genes) or allowing one to satisfy one's desires. Why preserve human life? Because we have a built-in imperative to do so? I can choose to obey that imperative or not. Why should I choose one way or the other?
Camus once claimed, "Why not suicide?" was the only remaining question for philosophy. Philosophers answered it a number of times in the past, but we seem to have a problem with it nowadays. If one is prepared to remove oneself from the gene pool, what argument will stop one? Circular reasoning from biological necessity can offer nothing. Only the concept of Duty will do so. Duty beyond the bounds of genetics. Of course, the answer to that question may not be useful....
There's another side to Duty, which is not the avoidance of death, but the embrace of it: dying for a cause. While Dawkins may crow that most scientists are "brights", he forgets that in the United States military, a stunning 93% of soldiers are Christian, and almost all are theists of one stripe or another. The people who are willing to give their lives to keep this country free and safe are apparently remarkably stupid. One wonders if they would be willing to continue their sacrifice if they were 'enlightened' and relieved of their mysticism. I can see very few suituations where one might rationally give one's life: one would have to be choosing between oneself and one's children, and also be too old to procreate. A great deal has been said lately on the willingness of believers to kill others. Very little has been said about believers' willingness to die for them.
On another subject, I notice that to succeed, any philosophy must offer at least some form of immortality. For "brights" (I have a rant, too small for this margin, on this subject), it's genetic. We die, our genes live on. In the end, something everlasting (or practically, Suniverse being greater than 0) must prop up the everyday.
