Vonnegut built his speech on a radical epistemological premise: all beliefs about the meaning of life were guesses, and some guesses were better than others. 'The belief that God wants heretics burned to death is a case in point. Some guesses are more suicidal than others. The belief that a true lover of God is immune to the bites of copperheads and rattlesnakes is a case in point.' But rather than counseling despair, he argued for upgrading our guesses using the enormous amount of 'good information about our bodies, about our planet, and the universe — about our past' that modern science had provided. He quoted Bertrand Russell: 'Sir, you did not give us enough information.' And added his own caveat: 'I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.' The implied moral code was simple: anything that wounds the planet is evil, anything that heals it is good.