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However Statistically Improbable The Entity You Seek To Explain By Invoking A Designer, The Designer Himself Has Got To Be At Least As Improbable. God Is The Ultimate Boeing 747

-Richard Dawkins

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However Statistically Improbable The

Richard Dawkins

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However Statistically Improbable The Entity You Seek To Explain By Invoking A Designer, The Designer Himself Has Got To Be At Least As Improbable. God Is The Ultimate Boeing 747

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St. Augustine Explicitly Warns Against A Very Narrow Perspective That Will Put Our Faith At Risk Of Looking Ridiculous. If You Step Back From That One Narrow Interpretation, What The Bible Describes Is Very Consistent With The Big Bang.

Let Children Learn About Different Faiths, Let Them Notice Their Incompatibility, And Let Them Draw Their Own Conclusions About The Consequences Of That Incompatibility. As For Whether They Are ‘valid,’ Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds When They Are Old Enough To Do So.

The Alternative Which I Favor Is To Renounce All Euphemisms And Grasp The Nettle Of The Word Atheism Itself, Precisely Because It Is A Taboo Word Carrying Frissons Of Hysterical Phobia. Critical Mass May Be Harder To Achieve Than With Some Non-confrontational Euphemism, But If We Did Achieve It With The Dread Word Atheist, The Political Impact Would Be All The Greater.

An Atheist Before Darwin Could Have Said, Following Hume: I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One. I Can't Help Feeling That Such A Position, Though Logically Sound, Would Have Left One Feeling Pretty Unsatisfied, And That Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

A Retaliator Behaves Like A Hawk When He Is Attacked By A Hawk, And Like A Dove When He Meets A Dove. When He Meets Another Retaliator He Plays Like A Dove. A Retaliator Is A Conditional Strategist. His Behaviour Depends On The Behaviour Of His Opponent.

I Accept That There May Be Things Far Grander And More Incomprehensible Than We Can Possibly Imagine.

The Total Amount Of Suffering Per Year In The Natural World Is Beyond All Decent Contemplation. During The Minute That It Takes Me To Compose This Sentence, Thousands Of Animals Are Being Eaten Alive, Many Others Are Running For Their Lives, Whimpering With Fear, Others Are Slowly Being Devoured From Within By Rasping Parasites, Thousands Of All Species Are Dying Of Starvation, Thirst, And Disease. The Universe That We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Pitiless Indifference.

I Am Against Religion Because It Teaches Us To Be Satisfied With Not Understanding The World.

There Is No Reason For Believing That Any Sort Of Gods Exist, And Quite Good Reasons For Believing That They Do Not Exist And Never Have. It Has All Been A Gigantic Waste Of Time And A Waste Of Life. It Would Be A Joke Of Cosmic Proportions If It Weren't So Tragic.

Whenever Conditions Arise In Which A New Kind Of Replicator Can Make Copies Of Itself, The New Replicators Will Tend To Take Over, And Start A New Kind Of Evolution Of Their Own. Once This New Evolution Begins, It Will In No Necessary Sense Be Subservient To The Old.

It Is Grindingly, Creakingly, Crashingly Obvious That If Darwinism Was Really A Theory Of Chance, It Could Not Work.

I Am One Of Those Scientists Who Feels That It Is No Longer Enough Just To Get On And Do Science. We Have To Devote A Significant Proportion Of Our Time And Resources To Defending It From Deliberate Attack From Organised Ignorance.

Many Of Us Saw Religion As Harmless Nonsense. Beliefs Might Lack All Supporting Evidence But, We Thought, If People Needed A Crutch For Consolation, Where's The Harm? September 11th Changed All That.

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

Even If It Were True That Evolution, Or The Teaching Of Evolution, Encouraged Immorality That Would Not Imply That The Theory Of Evolution Was False.

Theory Of Evolution

Humans Are Just A Very, Very Small Part Of The Panoply Of Life, And It Is Arguable That In A Certain Sense, Humans Have Emancipated Themselves From Darwinian Selection.

Why Did God Make Tigers So Good At Catching Prey, And At The Same Time Make Prey So Good At Getting Away From Tigers? You'd Think That If God Wanted One Thing Or The Other To Happen He'd Have Engineered It Rather Better. Maybe He Enjoyed The Spectator Sport?

Science Boosts Its Claim To Truth By Its Spectacular Ability To Make Matter And Energy Jump Through Hoops On Command, And To Predict What Will Happen And When.

I Am Very Hostile To Religion Because It Is Enormously Dominant, Especially In American Life. And I Don't Buy The Argument That, Well, It's Harmless. I Think It Is Harmful, Partly Because I Care Passionately About What's True.

The Time Has Come For People Of Reason To Say: Enough Is Enough! Religious Faith Discourages Independent Thought, It's Divisive And It's Dangerous.

I Suspect The Reason Is That Most People [...] Have A Residue Of Feeling That Darwinian Evolution Isn't Quite Big Enough To Explain Everything About Life. All I Can Say As A Biologist Is That The Feeling Disappears Progressively The More You Read About And Study What Is Known About Life And Evolution. I Want To Add One Thing More. The More You Understand The Significance Of Evolution, The More You Are Pushed Away From The Agnostic Position And Towards Atheism. Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

Why Do More Than 40 Percent Of Americans Think That The Universe Began After The Domestication Of The Dog?

When Two Opposite Points Of View Are Expressed With Equal Intensity, The Truth Does Not Necessarily Lie Exactly Half Way Between. It Is Possible For One Side Simply To Be Wrong.

We Humans Are An Extremely Important Manifestation Of The Replication Bomb, Because It Is Through Us - Through Our Brains, Our Symbolic Culture And Our Technology - That The Explosion May Proceed To The Next Stage And Reverberate Through Deep Space.

Mysteries Do Not Lose Their Poetry When Solved. Quite The Contrary; The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle And, In Any Case, When You Have Solved One Mystery You Uncover Others, Perhaps To Inspire Greater Poetry

Some People Find Clarity Threatening. They Like Muddle, Confusion, Obscurity. So When Somebody Does No More Than Speak Clearly It Sounds Threatening.

Luke [the Gospel Writer] Screws Up His Dating By Tactlessly Mentioning Events That Historians Are Capable Of Independently Checking. There Was Indeed A Census Under Governor Quirinius - A Local Census, Not One Decreed By Caesar Augustus For The Empire As A Whole - But It Happened Too Late In 6 Ad, Long After Herod's Death.

Evolution Is As Much A Fact As The Heat Of The Sun.

Heat Of The Sun

I Don't Want To Sound Callous. I Mean, Even If I Have Nothing To Offer, That Doesn't Matter, Because That Still Doesn't Mean That What Anybody Else Has To Offer Therefore Has To Be True.

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

Science Is The Disinterested Search For The Objective Truth About The Material World.

Objective Truth

Pope Francis Seems To Be A Much Nicer Man Than Pope Benedict, But I'm Not Sure That His Views On Things That Really Matter Are All That Different. Whereas Benedict Was Perhaps A Wolf In Wolf's Clothing, Francis Is Perhaps A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing.

It's A Truly Disgusting Idea That The Creator Of The Universe - Capable Of Inventing The Laws Of Physics And Designing The Evolutionary Process - That This Protégé Of Supernatural Intellect Couldn't Think Of A Better Way To Forgive Our Sins Than To Have Himself Tortured To Death.

I'm Quite A Softy, Yes. I Have A Blank Spot With Respect To Visual Art, But I Have Perhaps A Compensating Hypersensitivity To Poetry And Music.

Poetry And Music

It Is Time To Stop The Mealy-mouthed Euphemisms: 'nationalists', 'loyalists', 'communities', 'ethnic Groups', 'cultures', 'civilizations'. Religions Is The Word You Need. Religions Is The Word You Are Struggling Hypocritially To Avoid.

There Isn't [in New Atheism]. Nothing That Wasn't In Bertrand Russell Or Probably Robert Ingersoll. But I Suppose It Is More Of A Political Effect, In That All These Books Happened To Come Out At The Same Time. I Like To Think That We Have Some Influence.

As Long As We Accept The Principle That Religious Faith Must Be Respected Simply Because It Is Religious Faith, It Is Hard To Withhold Respect From The Faith Of Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers

Either It Is True That A Medicine Works Or It Isn't. It Cannot Be False In The Ordinary Sense But True In Some Alternative Sense. If A Therapy Or Treatment Is Anything More Than A Placebo, Properly Conducted Double-blind Trials, Statistically Analyzed, Will Eventually Bring It Through With Flying Colours. Many Candidates For Recognition As Orthodox Medicines Fail The Test And Are Summarily Dropped. The Alternative Label Should Not (though, Alas, It Does) Provide Immunity From The Same Fate.

I Can Remember At The Age Of About Six Being Fascinated By The Planets And Learning All About Mars And Venus And Things.

Things Exist Either Because They Have Recently Come Into Existence Or Because They Have Qualities That Made Them Unlikely To Be Destroyed In The Past.

Scientists Can Have Their Judgment Clouded By Their Professional Aspirations. And The Pure Truth Of Faith, Which You Can Think Of As This Clear Spiritual Water, Is Poured Into Rusty Vessels Called Human Beings, And So Sometimes The Benevolent Principles Of Faith Can Get Distorted As Positions Are Hardened.

Today The Theory Of Evolution Is About As Much Open To Doubt As The Theory That The Earth Goes Round The Sun.

Theory Of Evolution

I Do Think Imagination Is Enormously Valuable, And That Children Should Be Encouraged In Their Imagination. That's Very True.

All Religious Beliefs Seem Weird To People Not Brought Up In Them.

The Enlightenment Is Under Threat. So Is Reason. So Is Truth. So Is Science, Especially In The Schools Of America.

Organizing Atheists Is A Bit Like Herding Cats; They Are On The Whole Too Intelligent And Independent Minded To Lend Themselves To Being Herded.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

We Have Seen That Living Things Are Too Improbable And Too Beautifully 'designed' To Have Come Into Existence By Chance.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

There's No Point Of Having Faith If You Have Evidence.

The Fact That Somebody Does Good Doesn't Make Their Beliefs True.

The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain.

At Least The Fundamentalists Haven't Tried To Dilute Their Message. Their Faith Is Exposed For What It Is For All To See.

Intelligent Life On A Planet Comes Of Age When It First Works Out The Reason For Its Own Existence.

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

I Am At A Loss To Reconcile The Expensive And Glossy Production Values Of This Book With The Breathtaking Inanity Of The Content.

There Is An Anaesthetic Of Familiarity, A Sedative Of Ordinariness Which Dulls The Senses And Hides The Wonder Of Existence. For Those Of Us Not Gifted In Poetry, It Is At Least Worth While From Time To Time Making An Effort To Shake Off The Anaesthetic. What Is The Best Way Of Countering The Sluggish Habitutation Brought About By Our Gradual Crawl From Babyhood? We Can't Actually Fly To Another Planet. But We Can Recapture That Sense Of Having Just Tumbled Out To Life On A New World By Looking At Our Own World In Unfamiliar Ways.

Atheism Is Not A Religion. Abstinence Is Not A Sex Position.

It's Known That Stress Gives Rise To Disease. It's Also Known That Many Diseases, Especially Stress-related Diseases, Can Be Cured By Placebos - Pills That Have No Medicinal Effect, But People Think They Do, And So They Do.

The Patient Typically Finds Himself Impelled By Some Deep, Inner Conviction That Something Is True, Or Right, Or Virtuous: A Conviction That Doesn't Seem To Owe Anything To Evidence Or Reason, But Which, Nevertheless, He Feels As Totally Compelling And Convincing. We Doctors Refer To Such A Belief As 'faith'.

From My Perspective, God Cannot Be Completely Contained Within Nature, And Therefore God's Existence Is Outside Of Science's Ability To Really Weigh In.

I Mean, In A Way, I Feel That One Of The Reasons For Learning About Darwinian Evolution Is As An Object Lesson In How Not To Set Up Our Values And Social Lives.

Much As We Might Wish To Believe Otherwise, Universal Love And The Welfare Of The Species As A Whole Are Concepts Which Simply Do Not Make Evolutionary Sense.

The Assignment Of Purpose To Everything Is Called Teleology. Children Are Native Teleologists, And Many Never Grow Out Of It.

It Is Interesting To Ask Whether There's Any General Reason Why Being Religious Might Make You Do Nice Things Or Indeed Nasty Things. It's Possible That People Do Nice Things Because They're Religious. One Reason Might Be They're Hoping For A Reward In Heaven, Which Is Not A Very Noble Reason.

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

Saddam Hussein's Mind Would Have Been A Unique Resource For Historical, Political And Psychological Research: A Resource That Is Now Forever Unavailable To Scholars... In A Small Way His Execution Represents A Wanton And Vandalistic Destruction Of Important Research Data.

My Last Vestige Of 'hands Off Religion' Respect Disappeared In The Smoke And Choking Dust Of September 11, 2001, Followed By The 'national Day Of Prayer,' When Prelates And Pastors Did Their Tremulous Martin Luther King Impersonations And Urged People Of Mutually Incompatible Faiths To Hold Hands, United In Homage To The Very Force That Caused The Problem In The First Place.

Bush And Bin Laden Are Really On The Same Side: The Side Of Faith And Violence Against The Side Of Reason And Discussion. Both Have Implacable Faith That They Are Right And The Other Is Evil. Each Believes That When He Dies He Is Going To Heaven. Each Believes That If He Could Kill The Other, His Path To Paradise In The Next World Would Be Even Swifter. The Delusional "next World" Is Welcome To Both Of Them. This World Would Be A Much Better Place Without Either Of Them.

I Respect You Too Much To Respect Your Ridiculous Ideas.

We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

We Cannot Prove That There Is No God, But We Can Safely Conclude The He Is Very, Very Improbable Indeed.

There Is No God

The Bishop Goes On To The Human Eye, Asking Rhetorically, And With The Implication That There Is No Answer, 'how Could An Organ So Complex Evolve?' This Is Not An Argument, It Is Simply An Affirmation Of Incredulity.

...it Is A Telling Fact That, The World Over, The Vast Majority Of Children Follow The Religion Of Their Parents Rather Than Any Of The Other Available Religions.

The Chicken Is Only An Egg’s Way For Making Another Egg.

Good And Evil - I Don't Believe That There Is Hanging Out There, Anywhere, Something Called Good And Something Called Evil.

If We Say That Religion Is A Virus, Then Why Isn't Science A Virus?

I've Seen [lalla Ward] Episodes Of "doctor Who." They're Good, At Least Partly Because The Scripts Were Written By Douglas Adams.

You Can't Understand European History At All Other Than Through Religion, Or English Literature Either If You Can't Recognise Biblical Allusions.

Most People Understand That Sexual Lust Has To Do With Propagating Genes. Copulation In Nature Tends To Lead To Reproduction And So To More Genetic Copies. But In Modern Society, Most Copulations Involve Contraception, Designed Precisely To Avoid Reproduction. Altruism Probably Has Origins Like Those Of Lust.

The Virgin Birth, The Resurrection, The Raising Of Lazarus, Even The Old Testament Miracles, All Are Freely Used For Religious Propaganda, And They Are Very Effective With An Audience Of Unsophisticates And Children

If Your Plane Is Being Hijacked By An Armed Man Who, Though Prepared To Take Risks, Presumably Wants To Go On Living, There Is Room For Bargaining.

Religion Is A Powerful Weapon That Can Be Used Because It Persuades People To Do Things. And Thus It Can Be Used For Good Or Ill. But It Should Not Be A Powerful Weapon At All.

If The History-deniers Who Doubt The Fact Of Evolution Are Ignorant Of Biology, Those Who Think The World Began Less Than Ten Thousand Years Ago Are Worst Than Ignorant, They Are The Deluded To The Point Of Perversity.

Whether We Ever Get To Know About Them Or Not, There Are Very Probably Alien Civilizations That Are Superhuman, To The Point Of Being God-like In Ways That Exceed Anything A Theologian Could Possibly Imagine. Their Technical Achievements Would Seem As Supernatural To Us As Ours Would Seem To A Dark Age Peasant Transported To The Twenty-first Century. Imagine His Response To A Laptop Computer, A Mobile Telephone, A Hydrogen Bomb Or A Jumbo Jet.

[r]eductionism' Is One Of Those Things, Like Sin, That Is Only Mentioned By People Who Are Against It. To Call Oneself A Reductionist Will Sound, In Some Circles, A Bit Like Admitting To Eating Babies. But, Just As Nobody Actually Eats Babies, So Nobody Is Really A Reductionist In Any Sense Worth Being Against.

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

Any Altruistic System Is Inherently Unstable, Because It Is Open To Abuse By Selfish Individuals, Ready To Exploit It.

To Describe Religions As Mind Viruses Is Sometimes Interpreted As Contemptuous Or Even Hostile. It Is Both. I Am Often Asked Why I Am So Hostile To Organized Religion.

Suppose That There's A Gene That Makes You Gay If You Were Bottle-fed But That Has Some Completely Different Effect If You Were Breast-fed. So In The Days Before Bottles Were Invented That Gene Would Not Have Manifested Itself As Gay Behavior, But Now That Bottles Are Common It Can Do So.

I'm Not One Of Those Who Wants To Purge Our Society Of Our Christian History.

Cloning May Be Good And It May Be Bad. Probably It's A Bit Of Both. The Question Must Not Be Greeted With Reflex Hysteria But Decided Quietly, Soberly And On Its Own Merits. We Need Less Emotion And More Thought.

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 Sahara.

False Beliefs Can Be Every Bit As Consoling As True Ones, Right Up Until The Moment Of Disillusionment.

The Whole Of Technology Depends On A Scientific Background, And Of Course Technology Can Be Used For Evil Purposes. You Can't Blame Science For That.

It Really Comes Down To Parsimony, Economy Of Explanation. It Is Possible That Your Car Engine Is Driven By Psychokinetic Energy, But If It Looks Like A Petrol Engine, Smells Like A Petrol Engine And Performs Exactly As Well As A Petrol Engine, The Sensible Working Hypothesis Is That It Is A Petrol Engine.

I Could Easily Believe That Religion Could Enhance Health And Hence Survival, And That Therefore There Could Be Indeed Be Literally Darwinian Survival Value, Darwinian Selection In Favor Of Religion. None Of That Of Course Bears At All Upon The Truth Value Of The Claims Made By Religions.

It Is An Absurd Law [section 295a Of The Indian Penal Code] But Also Extremely Dangerous Because It Gives Fanatics, Whether They Are Hindus, Catholics Or Muslims, A Licence To Be Offended. It Also Allows People Who Are In Dispute With You To Make Up False Accusations Of Blasphemy.

I Find That Religion Really Does Motivate People To Do Horrible Things Because They Have This Passionate Faith In Whatever Their Religion Happens To Be, And It Teaches Them That The Other Religion Is The Wrong One.

Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, Distinctly Heard The Voice Of Jesus Telling Him To Kill Women, And He Was Locked Up For Life. George W. Bush Says That God Told Him To Invade Iraq (a Pity God Didn't Vouchsafe Him A Revelation That There Were No Weapons Of Mass Destruction).

Mass Destruction

The Idea Of A Divine Creator Belittles The Elegant Reality Of The Universe.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

Secularism Is Categorically Not Saying That The Religious May Not Speak Out Publicly Or Have A Say In Public Life. It Is About Saying That Religion Alone Should Not Confer A Privileged Say In Public Life, Or Greater Influence On It. It Really Is As Simple As That.

You Don't Believe That The Earth Is Round Only If You're An Astronaut. You Don't Believe Napoleon Existed Only If You're A Historian. You Believe These Things Because They're Facts, Proved By Evidence.

We're Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones.

Be Warned That If You Wish, As I Do, To Build A Society In Which Individuals Cooperate Generously And Unselfishly Towards A Common Good, You Can Expect Little Help From Biological Nature. Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Religious People Split Into Three Main Groups When Faced With Science. I Shall Label Them The "know-nothings", The "know-alls", And The "no-contests."

We Are All Atheists About Most Of The Gods That Societies Have Ever Believed In. Some Of Us Just Go One God Further.

If There Is A God

What Is Interesting About The Scientific World View Is That It Is True, Inspiring, Remarkable And That It Unites A Whole Lot Of Phenomena Under A Single Heading.

To Be Fair, Much Of The Bible Is Not Systematically Evil But Just Plain Weird, As You Would Expect Of A Chaotically Cobbled-together Anthology Of Disjointed Documents, Composed, Revised, Translated, Distorted And 'improved' By Hundreds Of Anonymous Authors, Editors And Copyists, Unknown To Us And Mostly Unknown To Each Other, Spanning Nine Centuries

... You Need More Than Luck To Navigate Successfully Through A Thousand Sieves In Succession.

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 Number Of People Who Could Be Here, In My Place, Out Number The Sand Grains In The Sahara. If You Think About All The Different Ways In Which Our Genes Could Be Permuted, You And I Are Quite Grotesquely Lucky To Be Here. The Number Of Events That Had To Happen In Order For You To Exist, In Order For Me To Exist... We Are Privileged To Be Alive And Nd We Should Make The Most Of Our Time On This World.

Most People, I Believe, Think That You Need A God To Explain The Existence Of The World, And Especially The Existence Of Life. They Are Wrong, But Our Education System Is Such That Many People Don't Know It.

Along With William Shakespeare And Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin Is Britain's Greatest Gift To The World. He Was Our Greatest Thinker.

Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

My Mind Is Open To The Most Wonderful Range Of Future Possibilities, Which I Cannot Even Dream About.

It Has Been Convincingly Demonstrated That Countries Where There Are High Rates Of Poverty, Or High Rates Of Economic Inequality, Are The Countries With The Highest Rates Of Religious Beliefs.

Economic Inequality

We Animals Are The Most Complicated Things In The Known Universe.

I Shall Not Make An Argument Ad Hominem. My Argument Is Ad Bullshitem.

God's Existence Is Either True Or Not. But Calling It A Scientific Question Implies That The Tools Of Science Can Provide The Answer.

Dna Is Rom. It Can Be Read Millions Of Times Over, But Only Written To Once - When It Is First Assembled The Birth Of The Cell In Which It Resides.

A Child Is Not A Christian Child, Not A Muslim Child, But A Child Of Christian Parents Or A Child Of Muslim Parents. This Latter Nomenclature, By The Way, Would Be An Excellent Piece Of Consciousness-raising For The Children Themselves. A Child Who Is Told She Is A 'child Of Muslim Parents' Will Immediately Realize That Religion Is Something For Her To Choose -or Reject- When She Becomes Old Enough To Do So.

The Universe Is A Strange And Wondrous Place. The Truth Is Quite Odd Enough To Need No Help From Pseudoscientific Charlatans.

You Cannot Be Both Sane And Well Educated And Disbelieve In Evolution. The Evidence Is So Strong That Any Sane, Educated Person Has Got To Believe In Evolution.

Discrimination Is Not Liberal. Arguing Against Discrimination Is Not Intolerance.

Time And Again, My Sociobiological Colleagues Have Upbraided Me As A Turncoat, Because I Will Not Agree With Them That The Ultimate Criterion For The Success Of A Meme Must Be Its Contribution To Darwinian "fitness". At Bottom, They Insist, A "good Meme" Spreads Because Brains Are Receptive To It, And The Receptiveness Of Brains Is Ultimately Shaped By (genetic) Natural Selection.

Matthew And Luke Handle The Problem Differently, By Deciding That Jesus Must Have Been Born In Bethlehem After All. But They Get Him There By Different Routes.

Our Subjective Judgment Of What Seems Like A Good Bet Is Irrelevant To What Is Actually A Good Bet.

You Believe That All Humanity Came From Adam And Eve, And Humans Have Not Evolved At All Since. So Tell Me; Between The Two Of Them, Which Was Black, Which Was White, And Which Was Asian?

I Might Respect You As A Brilliant Intellect, Runner, Musician Or Juggler. But Respect Your Beliefs? Only If They're Supported By Evidence.

Molecular Evidense Suggests That Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees Lived, In Africa, Between 5 And 7 Million Years Ago, Say Half A Million Generations Ago. This Is Not Long By Evolutionary Standards.

Natural Selection Is Anything But Random.

Natural Selection

No Matter How Much Knowledge And Wisdom You Acquire During Your Life, Not One Jot Will Be Passed On To Your Children By Genetic Means. Each New Generation Starts From Scratch.

I Read In The Paper Today The List Of The Most Popular Boys' Names In Britain. The First Was Jack, The Second Was Mohammed. That Makes Me Feel A Little Bit Worried.

People Will Listen To Sophisticated Physicists, Using God As A Kind Of Metaphor For The Deep Constants, The Deep Problems, The Deep Principles Of Physics, And Say That In That Sense I Believe In God. The Reaction Is, "oh, This Great Physicist Believes In God - That Means I'm Free To Believe In The Trinity And In The Crucifixion And In The Reincarnation Of Christ" - And All That Stuff, Which Of Course Has Nothing Whatever To Do With The Fundamental Constants Of Physics, Which Is What These Physicists Are Talking About.

For Centuries The Most Powerful Argument For God's Existence From The Physical World Was The So-called Argument From Design: Living Things Are So Beautiful And Elegant And So Apparently Purposeful, They Could Only Have Been Made By An Intelligent Designer. But [charles] Darwin Provided A Simpler Explanation. His Way Is A Gradual, Incremental Improvement Starting From Very Simple Beginnings And Working Up Step By Tiny Incremental Step To More Complexity, More Elegance, More Adaptive Perfection.

Some Sort Of Belief In All-powerful Supernatural Beings Is Common, If Not Universal. A Tendency To Obey Authority, Perhaps Especially In Children, A Tendency To Believe What You're Told, A Tendency To Fear Your Own Death, A Tendency To Wish To See Your Loved Ones Who Have Died, To Wish To See Them Again, A Wish To Understand Where You Came From, Where The World Came From, All These Psychological Predispositions, Under The Right Cultural Conditions, Tend To Lead To People Believing In Things For Which There Is No Evidence.

Who Are We To Say That That Was An Odd Way To Do It? I Don't Think That It Is God's Purpose To Make His Intention Absolutely Obvious To Us.

Science Has Taught Us, Against All Intuition, That Apparently Solid Things Like Crystals And Rocks Are Really Almost Entirely Composed Of Empty Space. And The Familiar Illustration Is The Nucleus Of An Atom Is A Fly In The Middle Of A Sports Stadium, And The Next Atom Is In The Next Sports Stadium.

It Is An Essential Part Of The Scientific Enterprise To Admit Ignorance, Even To Exult In Ignorance As A Challenge To Future Conquests.

Never Say, And Never Take Seriously Anyone Who Says, 'i Cannot Believe That So-and-so Could Have Evolved By Gradual Selection.' I Have Dubbed This Kind Of Fallacy 'the Argument From Personal Incredulity.' Time And Again, It Has Proven The Prelude To An Intellectual Banana-skin Experience.

In Childhood Our Credulity Serves Us Well. It Helps Us To Pack, With Extraordinary Rapidity, Our Skulls Full Of The Wisdom Of Our Parents And Our Ancestors. But If We Don't Grow Out Of It In The Fullness Of Time, Our ... Nature Makes Us A Sitting Target For Astrologers, Mediums, Gurus, Evangelists, And Quacks. We Need To Replace The Automatic Credulity Of Childhood With The Constructive Skepticism Of Adult Science.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

The Cynic About Human Nature Might Say That Religious Morality Is An Effective Way Of Keeping People In Line. The Threat Of Hell, The Reward Of Heaven, But The Rules Of The Holy Books Are Out Of Date And Often Barbaric.

A Delusion Is Something That People Believe In Despite A Total Lack Of Evidence.

Scientific Truth Is Too Beautiful To Be Sacrificed For The Sake Of Light Entertainment Or Money. Astrology Is An Aesthetic Affront. It Cheapens Astronomy, Like Using Beethoven For Commercial Jingles.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life.

Steve Grand Is The Creator Of What I Think Is The Nearest Approach To Artificial Life So Far, And His First Book, Creation: Life And How To Make It, Is As Interesting As You Would Expect. But He Illuminates More Than Just The Properties Of Life: His Originality Extends To Matter Itself And The Very Nature Of Reality. Not Since David Deutsch's The Fabric Of Reality Have I Encountered Such A Compelling Invitation To Think Everything Out Afresh, From The Bottom Up.

I Am Persuaded That 'child Abuse' Is No Exaggeration When Used To Describe What Teachers And Priests Are Doing To Children Whom They Encourage To Believe In Something Like...eternal Hell.

Offense Is What People Take When They Can't Take Argument.

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think And Evaluate Evidence. Faith Is Belief In Spite Of, Even Perhaps Because Of, The Lack Of Evidence.

Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's Science Hero, Was A Sort Of Irascible Man Constantly Bellowing At People, So He Was A Little Bit Of A Departure From Both Of Those Stereotypes.

I Think The Written Word Is Probably The Best Medium Of Communication Because You Have Time To Reflect, You Have Time To Choose Your Words, To Get Your Sentences Exactly Right. Whereas When You're Being Interviewed, Say, You Have To Talk On The Fly, You Have To Improvise, You Can Change Sentences Around, And They're Not Exactly Right.

In Medieval Times, The Church Used To Sell 'indulgences' For Money. This Amounted To Paying For Some Number Of Days' Remission From Purgatory, And The Church Literally (and With Breathtaking Presumption) Issued Signed Certificates Specifying The Number Of Days Off That Had Been Purchased. . . . And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History. . . .

As A Scientist, I Am Hostile To Fundamentalist Religion Because It Actively Debauches The Scientific Enterprise. It Teaches Us Not To Change Our Minds, And Not To Want To Know Exciting Things That Are Available To Be Known. It Subverts Science And Saps The Intellect.

Fundamentalist Religion

Do You Advocate The Ten Commandments As A Guide To The Good Life? Then I Can Only Presume That You Don't Know The Ten Commandments.

Ten Commandments

I Think The Probability Of A Supernatural Creator Existing Is Very Very Low.

A God Who Is Capable Of Sending Intelligible Signals To Millions Of People Simultaneously, And Of Receiving Messages From All Of Them Simultaneously, Cannot Be, Whatever Else He Might Be, Simple. Such Bandwidth!

Being An Atheist Frees You Up To Live This Life Properly, Happily, And Fully.

If It Suits [god] To Be A Deity That We Must Seek Without Being Forced To, Would It Not Have Been Sensible For Him To Use The Mechanism Of Evolution Without Posting Obvious Road Signs To Reveal His Role In Creation?

Beliefs. Once Entrenched In A Culture, They Persist, Evolve And Diverge, In A Manner Reminiscent Of Biological Evolution.

Show Me A Cultural Relativist At 30,000 Feet And I'll Show You A Hypocrite ... If You Are Flying To An International Congress Of Anthropologists Or Literary Critics, The Reason You Will Probably Get There - The Reason You Don't Plummet Into A Ploughed Field - Is That A Lot Of Western Scientifically Trained Engineers Have Got Their Sum Right.

Molecular Genetics Can Show Off Some Surprising Relationships Like, For Example, The Close Relationship Of Whales To Hippopotamuses, Which I Think Nobody Ever Guessed Until Molecular Data Was Looked At. The Closest Relatives Of Whales Are Hippopotamuses, Even Closer Than Any Other Cloven-hoofed Animals.

Jesus Was Not Content To Derive His Ethics From The Scriptures Of His Upbringing. He Explicitly Departed From Them. [...] Since A Principal Thesis Of This Chapter Is That We Do Not, And Should Not, Derive Our Morals From Scripture, Jesus Has To Be Honoured As A Model For That Very Thesis.

You Are Born Into A Dangerous World, There Are All Sorts Of Ways In Which You Could Die, And You Need To Believe Your Parents When They Tell You Don't Go Near The Edge Of The Cliff, Or Don't Pick Up That Snake, Etc. There Could Very Well Be A Darwinian Survival Value In That Sort Of Brain Rule Of Thumb. And A By-product Of That Could Be That You Believe Your Parents When They Tell You About The Juju In The Sky, Or Whatever It Might Be.

You Can't Statistically Explain Improbable Things Like Living Creatures By Saying That They Must Have Been Designed Because You're Still Left To Explain The Designer, Who Must Be, If Anything, An Even More Statistically Improbable And Elegant Thing.

Humans Have More Moral Responsibility Perhaps, Because They Are Capable Of Reasoning.

With So Many Mind-bytes To Be Downloaded, So Many Mental Codons To Be Replicated, It Is No Wonder That Child Brains Are Gullible, Open To Almost Any Suggestion, Vulnerable To Subversion, Easy Prey To Moonies, Scientologists And Nuns. Like Immune-deficient Patients, Children Are Wide Open To Mental Infections That Adults Might Brush Off Without Effort.

We Are Built As Gene Machines And Cultured As Meme Machines, But We Have The Power To Turn Against Our Creators. We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

Presumably What Happened To Jesus Was What Happens To All Of Us When We Die. We Decompose. Accounts Of Jesus's Resurrection And Ascension Are About As Well-documented As Jack And The Beanstalk.

The Darwinian Theory Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining Life. No Other Theory That Has Ever Been Suggested Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining Life.

I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One.

It's Very Likely That Most Mammals Have Consciousness, And Probably Birds, Too.

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

I'm Easily Persuaded That A Really Good Novelist Who Gets Inside Somebody Else's Head Could Be Serving A Valuable Purpose. I Enjoy Satirical Novels That Take A Wry, Humorous, Ironic Look At Modern Life.

If Something Is True, No Amount Of Wishful Thinking Will Change It.

Wishful Thinking

By Being Outside Of Nature, God Is Also Outside Of Space And Time.

The Book Is True, And If Evidence Seems To Condtradict It, It Is The Evidence That Must Be Thrown Out Not The Book.

It Is Important Not To Confuse Race And Religion.

Race And Religion

Evil…doesn’t Mean Doing Things That Have Bad Consequences For People. It Means Private Thoughts And Actions That Are Not To “the Christian Majority’s” Private Liking.

The Popularity Of The Paranormal, Oddly Enough, Might Even Be Grounds For Encouragement. I Think That The Appetite For Mystery, The Enthusiasm For That Which We Do Not Understand, Is Healthy And To Be Fostered. It Is The Same Appetite Which Drives The Best Of True Science, And It Is An Appetite Which True Science Is Best Qualified To Satisfy.

I Am Very Comfortable With The Idea That We Can Override Biology With Free Will.

An Intelligent Couple Can Read Their Darwin And Know That The Ultimate Reason For Their Sexual Urges Is Procreation. They Know That The Woman Cannot Conceive Because She Is On The Pill. Yet They Find That Their Sexual Desire Is In No Way Diminished By The Knowledge. Sexual Desire Is Sexual Desire And Its Force, In An Individual's Psychology, Is Independent Of The Ultimate Darwinian Pressure That Drove It. It Is A Strong Urge Which Exists Independently Of Its Ultimate Rationale.

It Is Absolutely Safe To Say That If You Meet Somebody Who Claims Not To Believe In Evolution, That Person Is Ignorant, Stupid Or Insane (or Wicked, But I'd Rather Not Consider That).

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

It Doesn't Hurt My Feeling When I Get Vilified By Fundamentalist Religious People. I've Actually Made Comedy Out Of It. I've Made Light Of That.

I Just Would Like To Say That Over More Than A Quarter-century As A Scientist And A Believer, I Find Absolutely Nothing In Conflict Between Agreeing With Richard [dawkins] In Practically All Of His Conclusions About The Natural World, And Also Saying That I Am Still Able To Accept And Embrace The Possibility That There Are Answers That Science Isn't Able To Provide About The Natural World - The Questions About Why Instead Of The Questions About How. I'm Interested In The Whys.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

My Computer Is A Very Complex Gadget And It Was Designed By Many Designers, So Why Must The Universe Have Only A Single Designer And Not Many Designers?

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

How Thoughtful Of God To Arrange Matters So That, Wherever You Happen To Be Born, The Local Religion Always Turns Out To Be The True One.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem. We Are Trying To Understand How We Have Got A Complicated World, And We Have An Explanation In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World, And We Explain That In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World And It All Hangs Together Down To An Ultimately Simple World. Now, God Is Not An Explanation Of That Kind. God Himself Cannot Be Simple If He Has Power To Do All The Things He Is Supposed To Do.

Complicated World

Evolution May Explain Some Features Of The Moral Law, But It Can't Explain Why It Should Have Any Real Significance.

Science Tells Us What We Have Reason To Believe. Not What We Have A Duty To Believe. Not What Experts, In Their Pontificating Wisdom, Instruct Us To Believe... No, Science Tells Us What There Is Good Reason To Believe.

What Are All Of Us But Self-reproducing Robots? We Have Been Put Together By Our Genes And What We Do Is Roam The World Looking For A Way To Sustain Ourselves And Ultimately Produce Another Robot Child.

I Was Confirmed At My Prep School At The Age Of 13.

The History Of Science Has Been One Long Series Of Violent Brainstorms, As Successive Generations Have Come To Terms With Increasing Levels Of Queerness In The Universe.

Can Omniscient God, Who Knows The Future, Find The Omnipotence To Change His Future Mind?

I've Never Heard Of William Craig. A Debate With Him Might Look Good On His Resume, But It Wouldn't Look Good On Mine!

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