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I Became A Little Alarmed At The Number Of My Readers Who Took The Meme More Positively As A Theory Of Human Culture In Its Own Right - Either To Criticize It (unfairly, Given My Original Modest Intention) Or To Carry It Far Beyond The Limits Of What I Then Thought Justified. This Was Why I May Have Seemed To Backtrack.

-Richard Dawkins

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I Became A Little

Richard Dawkins

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I Became A Little Alarmed At The Number Of My Readers Who Took The Meme More Positively As A Theory Of Human Culture In Its Own Right - Either To Criticize It (unfairly, Given My Original Modest Intention) Or To Carry It Far Beyond The Limits Of What I Then Thought Justified. This Was Why I May Have Seemed To Backtrack.

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If You Divide Christians Into Denominations, Agnostics And Atheists Come In Third, Behind Catholics And Baptists. That's Interesting When You Contrast It With The Lack Of Influence Of Nonbelievers.

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.

Religions Do Make Claims About The Universe--the Same Kinds Of Claims That Scientists Make, Except They're Usually False.

The Moral Law Is A Reason To Think Of God As Plausible - Not Just A God Who Sets The Universe In Motion But A God Who Cares About Human Beings, Because We Seem Uniquely Amongst Creatures On The Planet To Have This Far-developed Sense Of Morality.

There Is No Reason To Regard God As Immune From Consideration Along The Spectrum Of Probabilities. And There Is Certainly No Reason To Suppose That, Just Because God Can Be Neither Proved Nor Disproved, His Probability Of Existence Is 50 Per Cent.

The Truly Adult View [...] Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It. And We Can Make It Very Wonderful Indeed.

All Qualified Physicists, Biologists, Cosmologists And Geologists Agree, On The Basis Of Massive, Mutually Corroborating Evidence, That The Earth's Age Is At Least Four Billion Years.

Creationists Eagerly Seek A Gap In Present-day Knowledge Or Understanding. If An Apparent Gap Is Found, It Is Assumed That God, By Default, Must Fill It.

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.

What Francis [collins] Was Just Saying About Genesis Was, Of Course, A Little Private Quarrel Between Him And His Fundamentalist Colleagues. It Would Be Unseemly For Me To Enter In Except To Suggest That He'd Save Himself An Awful Lot Of Trouble If He Just Simply Ceased To Give Them The Time Of Day.

There Is A Popular Cliché ... Which Says That You Cannot Get Out Of Computers Any More Than You Have Put In..., That Computers Can Only Do Exactly What You Tell Them To, And That Therefore Computers Are Never Creative. This Cliché Is True Only In A Crashingly Trivial Sense, The Same Sense In Which Shakespeare Never Wrote Anything Except What His First Schoolteacher Taught Him To Write-words.

The Feeling Of Awed Wonder That Science Can Give Us Is One Of The Highest Experiences Of Which The Human Psyche Is Capable. It Is A Deep Aesthetic Passion To Rank With The Finest That Music And Poetry Can Deliver. It Is Truly One Of The Things That Make Life Worth Living And It Does So, If Anything, More Effectively If It Convinces Us That The Time We Have For Living Is Quite Finite.

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.

There's This Thing Called Being So Open-minded Your Brains Drop Out.

The Whole Point Of Religious Faith, Its Strength And Chief Glory, Is That It Does Not Depend On Rational Justification. The Rest Of Us Are Expected To Defend Our Prejudices. But Ask A Religious Person To Justify Their Faith And You Infringe 'religious Liberty'.

I Hate The Neologism "owned" For "scored A Victory Over". I Have No Intention Of Owning Anyone, And Nobody Will Ever Own Me.

Sometimes In Life It Is A Good Idea To Stop,sometimes It Is A Good Idea To Go On. The Trick Is To Decide When To Stop

[richard Leakey Is] A Robust Hero Of A Man, Who Actually Lives Up To The Cliché, “a Big Man In Every Sense Of The Word.” Like Other Big Men He Is Loved By Many, Feared By Some, And Not Over-preoccupied With The Judgments Of Any.

I Think There Could Be A Very Large Number Who Are Creationists By Default. Those Are The People I Want To Reach.

Book Critics Or Theatre Critics Can Be Derisively Negative And Gain Delighted Praise For The Trenchant With Of Their Review. But In Criticisms Of Religion Even Clarity Ceases To Be A Virtue And Sounds Like Aggressive Hostility. A Politician May Attack An Opponent Scathingly Across The Floor Of The House And Earn Plaudits For His Robust Pugnacity. But Let A Soberly Reasoning Critic Of Religion Employ What Would In Other Contexts Sound Merely Direct Or Forthright, And It Will Be Described As A 'rant'.

Suffering Is A Byproduct Of Evolution By Natural Selection, An Inevitable Consequence That May Worry Us In Our More Sympathetic Moments But Cannot Be Expected To Worry A Tiger - Even If A Tiger Can Be Said To Worry About Anything At All - And Certainly Cannot Be Expected To Worry Its Genes.

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

More Poignant For Us, At Laetoli In Tanzania Are The Companionable Footprints Of Three Real Hominids, Probably Australopithecus Afarensis, Walking Together 3.6 Million Years Ago In What Was Then Fresh Volcanic Ash. Who Does Not Wonder What These Individuals Were To Each Other, Whether They Held Hands Or Even Talked, And What Forgotten Errand They Shared In A Pliocene Dawn?

If Complex Organisms Demand An Explanation, So Does A Complex Designer. And It's No Solution To Raise The Theologian's Plea That God (or The Intelligent Designer) Is Simply Immune To The Normal Demands Of Scientific Explanation. To Do So Would Be To Shoot Yourself In The Foot. You Cannot Have It Both Ways. Either Id Belongs In The Science Classroom, In Which Case It Must Submit To The Discipline Required Of A Scientific Hypothesis. Or It Does Not, In Which Case, Get It Out Of The Science Classroom And Send It Back To Church, Where It Belongs.

I Personally Would Consider It To Be An Honour To Be Fossilized.

[invading Iraq] Will Unite The Entire Arab World Against The West.

I'm Not So Fond Of The Sort Of Science Fiction That Isn't Really Science Fiction But Is Sometimes Thought To Be - Gothic Princesses And White Horses And Bats And Castles And Things.

Faith Is The Lack Of Evidence, And It Shouldn't Be That Difficult To Convince People That The Right Reason To Believe Something Is That There Is Evidence For It. People Do Not Innately Go For This View, But Nevertheless It Is Not That Difficult To Teach.

Yesterday's Dangerous Idea Is Today's Orthodoxy And Tomorrow's Cliché.

Dangerous Ideas

If There Is Something That Appears To Lie Beyond The Natural World As It Is Now Imperfectly Understood, We Hope To Eventually Understand It And Embrace It Within The Natural. As Ever When We Unweave A Rainbow, It Will Not Become Less Wonderful.

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.

I Mean I Think That When You've Got A Big Brain, When You Find Yourself Planted In A World With A Brain Big Enough To Understand Quite A Lot Of What You See Around You, But Not Everything, You Naturally Fall To Thinking About The Deep Mysteries. Where Do We Come From? Where Does The World Come From? Where Does The Universe Come From?

There Are All Sorts Of Things That Would Be Comforting. I Expect An Injection Of Morphine Would Be Comforting... But To Say That Something Is Comforting Is Not To Say That It's True.

When I Say That Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines, One Shouldn't Put Too Much Emphasis On The Word 'just.' There Is A Very Great Deal Of Complication, And Indeed Beauty In Being A Gene Machine.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

I Great Difficulty Having Any Respect For A Religion That Has So Little Confidence In The Truth Of Its Beliefs That It Feels Reduced To Using Threats In Order To Propagate Those Beliefs.

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

We Accept That People Are Irrational For Good Darwinian Reasons. But I Don't Think We Should Be So Pessimistic As To Think That Therefore We're Forever Condemned To Be Irrational.

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

It Is Universally Accepted That An Admission Of Atheism Would Be Instant Political Suicide For Any (u.s.) Presidential Candidate.

I Am Not Absolutely Positive There Is No God. Only In The Sense That I'm Not Absolutely Positive There Is No Large China Teapot In Orbit In The Solar System.

Atheists Sometimes Come Across As A Bit Arrogant In This Regard, And Characterizing Faith As Something Only An Idiot Would Attach Themselves To.

To An Honest Judge, The Alleged Convergence Between Religion And Science Is A Shallow, Empty, Hollow, Spin-doctored Sham.

To Me, The Right Approach Is To Say We Are Profoundly Ignorant Of These Matters. We Need To Work On Them. But To Suddenly Say The Answer Is God - It's That That Seems To Me To Close Off The Discussion.

I Think More Than 20 Percent Of Nobel Prizes Have Been Won By Jews.

You Contain A Trillion Copies Of A Large, Textual Document Written In A Highly Accurate, Digital Code, Each Copy As Voluminous As A Substantial Book. I'm Talking, Of Course, Of The Dna In Your Cells.

The List Of Things About Which We Strictly Have To Be Agnostic Doesn't Stop At Tooth Fairies And Celestial Teapots. It Is Infinite. If You Want To Believe In A Particular One Of Them - Teapots, Unicorns, Or Tooth Fairies, Thor Or Yahweh - The Onus Is On You To Say Why You Believe In It. The Onus Is Not On The Rest Of Us To Say Why We Do Not. We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

Religion Is Not The Root Of All Evil, For No One Thing Is The Root Of All Anything.

With Respect To Those Meanings Of 'human' That Are Relevant To The Morality Of Abortion, Any Fetus Is Less Human Than An Adult Pig.

The Truth Is More Magical - In The Best And Most Exciting Sense Of The Word - Than Any Myth Or Made-up Mystery Or Miracle. Science Has Its Own Magic: The Magic Of Reality.

I Didn't Have A Very Starry School Career, I Was Medium To Above Average, Nothing Special.

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

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.

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

We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

It Often Turns Out On Closer Inspection That Acts Of Apparent Altruism Are Really Selfishness In Disguise.

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.

There Is A Tendency For People To Say Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Inappropriate.

If You Have A Faith, It Is Statistically Overwhelmingly Likely That It Is The Same Faith As Your Parents And Grandparents Had. No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth. The Convictions That You So Passionately Believe Would Have Been A Completely Different, And Largely Contradictory, Set Of Convictions, If Only You Had Happened To Be Born In A Different Place.

They Are In You And Me; They Created Us, Body And Mind; And Their Preservation Is The Ultimate Rationale For Our Existence. They Have Come A Long Way, Those Replicators. Now They Go By The Name Of Genes, And We Are Their Survival Machines.

Personally, I Rather Look Forward To A Computer Program Winning The World Chess Championship. Humanity Needs A Lesson In Humility.

I Have Often Said That I Am A Passionate Darwinian When It Comes To Explaining Why We Exist.

It's A Flaw In Our Argument, For Sure. By Any Reading Of Evolutionary Theory, Creationists Ought To Have Died Out Ages Ago. They Serve No Function In The Planet's Ecosystem, And No Other Species Has Survived So Long While In Such Fundamental Disagreement With Observable Reality. If I Wasn't Such An Ardent Believer In Secular Materialism, I'd Wager This Is Really Troubling Darwin In The Afterlife.

It's A Horrible Idea That God, This Paragon Of Wisdom And Knowledge, Power, Couldn't Think Of A Better Way To Forgive Us Our Sins Than To Come Down To Earth In His Alter Ego As His Son And Have Himself Hideously Tortured And Executed So That He Could Forgive Himself.

Faith Is Belief Without Evidence And Reason; Coincidentally That's Also The Definition Of Delusion.

Some Physicists Solve That Problem Of The Necessity Of Finely Tuned Physical Constants ... By Invoking The Anthropic Principle, Saying, Well, Here We Are, We Exist, We Have To Be In The Kind Of Universe Capable Of Giving Rise To Us. That In Itself Is, I Think, Unsatisfying, And As John Lennox Rightly Says, Some Physicists Solve That By The Multiverse Idea-the Idea That Our Universe Is Just One Of Many Universes.

And The Beauty Of The Anthropic Principle Is That It Tells Us, Against All Intuition, That A Chemical Model Need Only Predict That Life Will Arise On One Planet In A Billion Billion To Give Us A Good And Entirely Satisfying Explanation For The Presence Of Life Here.

Design Can Never Be An Ultimate Explanation For Anything. It Can Only Be A Proximate Explanation. A Plane Or A Car Is Explained By A Designer But That's Because The Designer Himself, The Engineer, Is Explained By Natural Selection.

If People Think God Is Interesting, The Onus Is On Them To Show That There Is Anything There To Talk About. Otherwise They Should Just Shut Up About It.

I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular. I Suppose I Have To Say Politically I Would Like Religion To Become Gentler And Nicer And To Stop Interfering With Other People's Lives, Stop Repressing Women, Stop Indoctrinating Children, All That Sort Of Thing. But I Really, Really Would Like To See Religion Go Away Altogether.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

The Present Luddism Over Genetic Engineering May Die A Natural Death As The Computer-illiterate Generation Is Superseded.... I Fear That, If The Green Movement's High-amplitude Warnings Over Gmos Turn Out To Be Empty, People Will Be Dangerously Disinclined To Listen To Other And More Serious Warnings.

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.

Religion Is The Most Inflammatory Enemy-labelling Device In History.

It Has Become Almost A Cliché To Remark That Nobody Boasts Of Ignorance Of Literature, But It Is Socially Acceptable To Boast Ignorance Of Science And Proudly Claim Incompetence In Mathematics.

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?

Isn't It A Remarkable Coincidence Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents ? And It Always Just Happens To Be The Right Religion. Religions Run In Families. If We'd Been Brought Up In Ancient Greece We Would All Be Worshiping Zeus And Apollo. If We Had Been Born Vikings We Would Be Worshiping Wotan And Thor. How Does This Come About ? Through Childhood Indoctrination.

I Have Never Quite Understood - And This Is No Doubt My Failing - I Never Quite Understood Why You Would Read Fiction To Understand The Human Condition.

...i Am Not Attacking Any Particular God Or Gods. I Am Attacking God, All Gods, Anything And Everything Supernatural, Whenever Or Wherever They Have Been Or Will Be Invented.

Anything And Everything

Most Of What We Strive For In Our Modern Life Uses The Apparatus Of Goal Seeking That Was Originally Set Up To Seek Goals In The State Of Nature.

If You Are Asking Me If My More Global Purpose Is A Battle Against Religion, It Is.

The World And The Universe Is An Extremely Beautiful Place, And The More We Understand About It The More Beautiful Does It Appear.

The Feeling Of Awed Wonder That Science Can Give Us Is One Of The Highest Experiences Of Which The Human Psyche Is Capable.

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

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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.

The Take-home Message Is That We Should Blame Religion Itself, Not Religious Extremism - As Though That Were Some Kind Of Terrible Perversion Of Real, Decent Religion. Voltaire Got It Right Long Ago: 'those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.' So Did Bertrand Russell: 'many People Would Sooner Die Than Think. In Fact They Do.

Most Of The Ones [nobel Prizes] That Have Gone To Muslims Have Been Peace Prizes, And The [number Of Muslims] Who Have Gotten Them For Scientific Work Is Exceedingly Low. But In Jews, It Is Exceedingly High.

Theology Is A Non-subject. I'm Not Saying That Professors Of Theology Are Non-professors. They Do Interesting Things, Like Study Biblical History, Biblical Literature. But Theology, The Study Of Gods, The Study Of What Gods Do, Presupposes That Gods Exist. The Only Kind Of Theology That I Take Account Of Are Those Theological Arguments That Actually Argue For The Existence Of God.

Such Delusions Of Grandeur To Think That A God With A Hundred Billion Galaxies On His Mind Would Give A Tuppenny Damn Who You Sleep With, Or Indeed Whether You Believe In Him.

Hence, At The Moment Of The Creation Of The Universe, God Could Also Have Activated Evolution, With Full Knowledge Of How It Would Turn Out, Perhaps Even Including Our Having This Conversation. The Idea That He Could Both Foresee The Future And Also Give Us Spirit And Free Will To Carry Out Our Own Desires Becomes Entirely Acceptable.

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.

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 Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

A Gene Might Be Able To Assist Replicas Of Itself That Are Sitting In Other Bodies. If So, This Would Appear As Individual Altruism But It Would Be Brought About By Gene Selfishness.

Any Belief In Miracles Is Flat Contradictory Not Just To The Facts Of Science But To The Spirit Of Science.

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.

Superficially It's A Problem If Homosexuality Is Genetic - If The Difference Between People's Sexual Preferences Is Genetic - Because At Least A Pure Homosexual Would Be Unlikely To Reproduce And Therefore Pass On The Genes. So The First Question You Ask Is, Is It Actually Genetic, And The Answer Is Probably To Some Extent Yes.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realize That We Are Apes.

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

If Saying That Religion Should Be A Private Matter And Should Not Have Special Influence In Public Life Is Illiberal, Then 74% Of U.k. Christians Are Illiberal, Too.

Aquarius Is A Miscellaneous Set Of Stars All At Different Distances From Us, Which Have No Connection With Each Other Except That They Constitute A (meaningless) Pattern When Seen From A Certain (not Particularly Special) Place In The Galaxy (here).

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."

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.

The River Of My Title Is A River Of Dna, A River Of Information, Not A River Of Bones And Tissues

If You're An Atheist, You Know, You Believe, This Is The Only Life You're Going To Get. It's A Precious Life. It's A Beautiful Life. Its Something We Should Live To The Full, To The End Of Our Days. Where If You're Religious And You Believe In Another Life Somehow, That Means You Don't Live This Life To The Full Because You Think You're Going To Get Another One. That's An Awfully Negative Way To Live A Life. Being A Atheist Frees You Up To Live This Life Properly, Happily And Fully

Darwin Gives Courage To The Rest Of Science That We Shall End Up Understanding Literally Everything, Springing From Almost Nothing - A Thought Extremely Hard To Comprehend And Believe.

Do Not Indoctrinate Your Children. Teach Them How To Think For Themselves, How To Evaluate Evidence, And How To Disagree With You.

I Think We Have Got To Start Again And Go Right Back To First Principles. The Argument I Shall Advance, Surprising As It May Seem Coming From The Author Of The Earlier Chapters, Is That, For An Understanding Of The Evolution Of Modern Man, We Must Begin By Throwing Out The Gene As The Sole Basis Of Our Ideas On Evolution. If There Is Only One Creator Who Made The Tiger And The Lamb, The Cheetah And The Gazelle, What Is He Playing At? Is He A Sadist Who Enjoys Spectator Blood Sports? ... Is He Manuvering To Maximize David Attenborough's Television Ratings?

If God Wanted To Create Life And Create Humans, It Would Be Slightly Odd That He Should Choose The Extraordinarily Roundabout Way Of Waiting For 10 Billion Years Before Life Got Started And Then Waiting For Another 4 Billion Years Until You Got Human Beings Capable Of Worshipping And Sinning And All The Other Things Religious People Are Interested In.

It's Very Important To Try To Inculcate Into Children Moral Rules, Such As "do As You Would Be Done By."

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.

People Will Say, "you're Never Going To Convince Me That Something As Complicated As An Eye Could Come About By Sheer Chance." And The Answer Is That Natural Selection Is The Very Opposite Of Sheer Chance. Natural Selection Is A Non-random Process.

Theologians Will Protest That The Story Of Abraham Sacrificing Issac Should Not Be Taken As Literal Fact. And The Appropriate Response Is Twofold: First, Many, Many People Even To This Day, Do Take The Whole Of Their Scripture To Be Literal Fact, And They Have A Great Deal Of Political Power Over The Rest Of Us, Especially In The United States And In The Islamic World. Second, If Not Of Literal Fact, How Should We Take The Story? As An Alagory? Then An Alagory For What? Surely, Nothing Praiseworthy. As A Moral Lesson? But What Kind Of Morals Could One Derive From This Appalling Story?

I Was Brought Up In A Family Which Valued Natural History. Both My Parents Knew The Names Of All The British Wildflowers, So As We Went Walking The Country, I Was Constantly Being Exposed To A Natural History Sort Of Knowledge.

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.

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.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem.

Faith Rests Squarely Upon Reason, But With The Added Component Of Revelation.

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.

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.

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

Granted, We May Try To Help Our Own Family Members Because They Share Our Dna. Or Help Someone Else In Expectation That They Will Help Us Later. But When You Look At What We Admire As The Most Generous Manifestations Of Altruism, They Are Not Based On Kin Selection Or Reciprocity. An Extreme Example Might Be Oskar Schindler Risking His Life To Save More Than A Thousand Jews From The Gas Chambers. That's The Opposite Of Saving His Genes.

The Distribution Of Species On Islands And Continents Throughout The World Is Exactly What You'd Expect If Evolution Was A Fact. The Distribution Of Fossils In Space And In Time Are Exactly What You Would Expect If Evolution Were A Fact. There Are Millions Of Facts All Pointing In The Same Direction And No Facts Pointing In The Wrong Direction.

We Have Sexual Lust Even Though We Know Perfectly Well That, Because We're Using Contraception, It Is Not Going To Result In The Propagation Of Our Genes. That Doesn't Matter, Because The Lust Was Built Into Our Brains At A Time When There Was No Contraception.

No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth.

If We Ever Talk To Aliens, Their Civilisation Will Be Far More Advanced Than Ours (because Of Distances Involved). They Won't Be Religious!

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.

I Get The Feeling More And More That Religion Is Being Left Behind.

There Are Many Religious Points Of View Where The Conservation Of The World Is Just As Important As It Is To Scientists.

Over The Centuries, We've Moved On From Scripture To Accumulate Precepts Of Ethical, Legal And Moral Philosophy. We've Evolved A Liberal Consensus Of What We Regard As Underpinnings Of Decent Society, Such As The Idea That We Don't Approve Of Slavery Or Discrimination On The Grounds Of Race Or Sex, That We Respect Free Speech And The Rights Of The Individual. All Of These Things That Have Become Second Nature To Our Morals Today Owe Very Little To Religion, And Mostly Have Been Won In Opposition To The Teeth Of Religion.

My God Is Not Improbable To Me. He Has No Need Of A Creation Story For Himself Or To Be Fine-tuned By Something Else.

Science Is Wonderful, Science Is Important, And So Are Children, So Are Young People, And So What Could Be Better Than To Write A Science Book For Young People?

Do You Really Mean The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up.

Religious Faith Not Only Lacks Evidence, Its Independence From Evidence Is Its Pride And Joy, Shouted From The Rooftops.

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.

Blindness To Suffering Is An Inherent Consequence Of Natural Selection. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

The Argument From Improbability, Properly Deployed, Comes Close To Proving That God Does Not Exist.

It Is A Simple Logic Truth That, Short Of Mass Emigration Into Space, With Rockets Taking Off At The Rate Of Several Million Per Second, Uncontrolled Birth-rates Are Bound To Lead To Horribly Increased Death –rates. It Is Hard To Believe That This Simple Truth Is Not Understood By Those Leaders Who Forbid Their Followers To Use Effective Contraceptive Methods. They Express A Preference For ‘natural’ Methods Of Population Limitation, And A Natural Method Is Exactly What They Are Going To Get. It Is Called Starvation.

Design Cannot Precede Evolution And Therefore Cannot Underlie The Universe.

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.

Anybody Who Objects To Cloning On Principle Has To Answer To All The Identical Twins In The World Who Might Be Insulted By The Thought That There Is Something Offensive About Their Very Existence. Clones Are Simply Identical Twins.

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.

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.

Yes, Testosterone-sodden Young Men Too Unattractive To Get A Woman In This World Might Be Desperate Enough To Go For 72 Private Virgins In The Next.

There Is Economics In Biology, Nothing Is Free, Everything Has To Be Paid For, There Are Costs As Well As Benefits To Everything In Life, For Example, There Was Never Sufficient Natural Selection Pressure To Develop Better Eyes, Individuals Could Earn Other Things Like Smiley Smiles Rather Than Waste Energy & Time On Better Eyes.

Even If Not A Single Fossil Has Ever Been Found, The Evidence From Surviving Animals Would Still Overwhelmingly Force The Conclusion That Darwin Was Right.

Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

The Bitter Hatreds That Now Poison Middle Eastern Politics Are Rooted In The Real Or Perceived Wrong Of The Setting Up Of A Jewish State In An Islamic Region. In View Of All That The Jews Had Been Through, It Must Have Seemed A Fair And Humane Solution. Probably Deep Familiarity With The Old Testament Had Given The European And American Decision-makers Some Sort Of Idea That This Really Was The Historic Homeland Of The Jews.

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.

We Have To Find Our Own Purposes In Life, Which Are Not Derived Directly From Our Scientific History.

Purpose Of Life

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.

Alister Mcgrath Has Now Written Two Books With My Name In The Title. The Poet W. B. Yeats, When Asked To Say Something About Bad Poets Who Made A Living By Parasitizing Him, Wrote The Splendid Line, 'was There Ever Dog That Praised His Fleas?

Science Is Interesting, And If You Don't Agree, You Can Fvck Off.

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.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

‎"matter Flows From Place To Place, And Momentarily Comes Together To Be You. Some People Find That Thought Disturbing; I Find The Reality Thrilling.

There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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

By All Means Let's Be Open-minded, But Not So Open-minded That Our Brains Drop Out.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

We Are Digital Archives Of The African Pliocene, Even Of Devonian Seas; Walking Repositories Of Wisdom Out Of The Old Days. You Could Spend A Lifetime Reading In This Ancient Library And Die Unsated By The Wonder Of It.

Far From Being Demeaning To Human Spiritual Values, Scientific Rationalism Is The Crowning Glory Of The Human Spirit. Of Course You Can Use The Products Of Science To Do Bad Things, But You Can Use Them To Do Good Things Too.

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.

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

On One Planet [earth], And Possibly Only One Planet In The Entire Universe, Molecules That Would Normally Make Nothing More Complicated Than A Chunk Of Rock, Gather Themselves Together Into Chunks Of Rock-sized Matter Of Such Staggering Complexity That They Are Capable Of Running, Jumping, Swimming, Flying, Seeing, Hearing, Capturing And Eating Other Such Animated Chunks Of Complexity; Capable In Some Cases Of Thinking And Feeling, And Falling In Love With Yet Other Chunks Of Complex Matter.

Falling In Love

We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

The Thing That Defines A Species Is That All Members Have The Same Addressing System For Their Dna.

I Do Object To The Assumption That Anything That Might Be Outside Of Nature Is Ruled Out Of The Conversation. That's An Impoverished View Of The Kinds Of Questions We Humans Can Ask, Such As "why Am I Here?", "what Happens After We Die?", "is There A God?" If You Refuse To Acknowledge Their Appropriateness, You End Up With A Zero Probability Of God After Examining The Natural World Because It Doesn't Convince You On A Proof Basis.

Be Thankful That You Have A Life, And Forsake Your Vain And Presumptuous Desire For A Second One.

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

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

When We Talk About Genes For Anything, Like A Gene For Being Gay Or A Gene For Being Aggressive Or Something Of That Sort, That A Gene For Anything May Not Have Been A Gene For That Thing Under Different Environmental Conditions.

People Really, Really Hate Their Religion Being Criticized. It's As Though You've Said They Had An Ugly Face; They Seem To Identify Personally With It.

We Should Learn To Understand Natural Selection, So That We Can Oppose Any Tendency To Apply It To Human Politics.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

I Do Feel Visceral Revulsion At The Burka Because For Me It Is A Symbol Of The Oppression Of Women.

There Could Be Something Incredibly Grand And Incomprehensible And Beyond Our Present Understanding.

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.

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

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?

There's Nothing Nonsensical About Saying That What Would Evolve If Darwinian Selection Has Its Head Is Something That You Don't Want To Happen. And I Could Easily Imagine Trying To Go Against Darwinism.

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

We Don't Need Fossils - The Case For Evolution Is Watertight Without Them; So It Is Paradoxical To Use Gaps In The Fossil Record As Though They Were Evidence Against Evolution

It Sounds Superficially Fair. But It Presupposes That That There Is Something In Christian Theology To Be Ignorant About. The Entire Thrust Of My Position Is That Christian Theology Is A Non-subject. It Is Empty. Vacuous. Devoid Of Coherence Or Content. I Imagine That Mcgrath Would Join Me In Expressing Disbelief In Fairies, Astrology And Thor's Hammer. How Would He Respond If A Fairyologist, Astrologer Or Viking Accused Him Of Ignorance Of Their Respective Subjects?

The Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus Has Shown Great Courage, In The Face Of Spiteful Vested Interests, In Demonstrating How Easy It Is For People To Concoct Memories That Are Entirely False But Which Seem, To The Victim, Every Bit As Real As True Memories.

Why, I Can't Help Wondering, Is God Thought To Need Such Ferocious Defence? One Might Have Supposed Him Amply Capable Of Looking After Himself.

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.

The Universe Doesn't Owe Us Condolence Or Consolation; It Doesn't Owe Us A Nice Warm Feeling Inside.

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.

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.

Science Coverage Could Be Improved By The Recognition That Science Is Timeless, And Therefore Science Stories Should Not Need To Be Pegged To An Item In The News.

Science Offers Us An Explanation Of How Complexity (the Difficult) Arose Out Of Simplicity (the Easy). The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain. It Postulates The Difficult To Explain, And Leaves It At That.

Christianity, Just As Much As Islam, Teaches Children That Unquestioned Faith Is A Virtue. You Don't Have To Make The Case For What You Believe. If Somebody Announces That It Is Part Of His Faith, The Rest Of Society, Whether Of The Same Faith, Or Another, Or Of None, Is Obliged, By Ingrained Custom, To "respect" It Without Question; Respect It Until The Day It Manifests Itself In A Horrible Massacre Like The Destruction Of The World Trade Center, Or The London Or Madrid Bombings.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

Why Would Anybody Be Intimidated By Mere Words? I Mean, Neither I Nor Any Other Athiest That I Know Ever Threatens Violence. We Never Threaten To Fly Planes Into Skyscrapers. We Never Threaten Suicide Bombs. We Are Very Gentle People. All We Do Is Use Words To Talk About Things Like The Cosmos, The Origin Of The Universe, Evolution, The Origin Of Life. What's There To Be Frightened Of? It's Just An Opinion.

Public Sharing Is An Important Part Of Science.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

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