I came across this video today and wanted to share it. It's a speech given by Neil Tyson in the Beyond Belief series. It addresses the topic of this thread and explains what I was trying to convey much better, I think. His speech is about 40 minutes long but I also recommend watching the entire video. In fact there are many sessions to Beyond Belief and if you have the time I recommend watching them all. It has a lot of great speakers and covers many ideas.
Session 2 - Beyond Belief 2006 - Google Video