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I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

-Richard Dawkins

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I Think That The

Richard Dawkins

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I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

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Of Course In Science There Are Things That Are Open To Doubt And Things Need To Be Discussed. But Among The Things That Science Does Know, Evolution Is About As Certain As Anything We Know.

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

There Is No God

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'm Not Much Given To Straight, Irony-free Hero-worship.

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).

I Personally Would Go Further And Say That, If Your Morality Is Based, As Mine Is, On A Desire To Increase The Sum Of Happiness And Reduce Suffering, The Decision To Deliberately Give Birth To A Down Baby, When You Have The Choice To Abort It Early In The Pregnancy, Might Actually Be Immoral From The Point Of View Of The Child’s Own Welfare.

I Find Many Of Answers In The Spiritual Realm. That In No Way Compromises My Ability To Think Rigorously As A Scientist.

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.

Religion Teaches The Dangerous Nonsense That Death Is Not The End.

The Feature Of Living Matter That Most Demands Explanation Is That It Is Almost Unimaginably Complicated In Directions That Convey A Powerful Illusion Of Deliberate Design.

Gravity Is Not A Version Of The Truth. It Is The Truth. Anyone Who Doubts It Is Invited To Jump Out A Tenth-storey Window.

Science Has Eradicated Smallpox, Can Immunise Against Most Previously Deadly Viruses, Can Kill Most Previously Deadly Bacteria. Theology Has Done Nothing But Talk Of Pestilence As The Wages Of Sin.

The Important Thing To Remember About Mathematics Is Not To Be Frightened

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.

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.

I'm Sure Obama Is An Atheist, I'm Sure Kennedy Was An Atheist, But I Doubt If Pope Frank Is.

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.

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.

Any Entity Capable Of Intelligently Designing Something As Improbable As Dutchman's Pipe (or A Universe) Would Have To Be Even More Improbable Than A Dutchman's Pipe. Far From Terminating The Vicious Regress, God Aggravates It With A Vengeance.

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

Scientists Disagree Among Themselves But They Never Fight Over Their Disagreements. They Argue About Evidence Or Go Out And Seek New Evidence. Much The Same Is True Of Philosophers, Historians And Literary Critics.

I'm Fond Of Science Fiction. But Not All Science Fiction.

Science Fiction

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 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.

The Beauty Of Evolution Is That It Does Provide An Explanation Of How You Can Get Complexity Out Of Simplicity. It Does It By Slow, Gradual Degree. At No Point Are You Postulating The Sudden Coming Into Existence Of A Complicated Being.

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.

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

Religion Ends And Philosophy Begins, Just As Alchemy Ends And Chemistry Begins, And Astrology Ends And Astronomy Begins.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

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.

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

My Interest In Biology Was Pretty Much Always On The Philosophical Side.

I Need To Learn Not To Bend Over Backwards To Be Nice To Faith-heads. Give These People An Inch And They Take A League. I Think, As I Did When I Wrote The God Delusion, That The Roman Catholic Church Is A Disgusting Institution, The Second Most Evil Religion In The World.

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

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.

There Is Something So Mysterious That It Is Almost Like God. God Is In The Equations. God Is In The Fundamental Constants. And That's Fine. I Mean, That's Just Redefinition Of That Which We Find Mysterious At The Basis Of The Universe.

If A Healing Technique Is Demonstrated To Have Curative Properties In Properly Controlled Double-blind Trials, It Ceases To Be Alternative. It Simply, As Diamond Explains, Becomes Medicine.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An Internet Meme Is A Hijacking Of The Original Idea. Instead Of Mutating By Random Change And Spreading By A Form Of Darwinian Selection, Internet Memes Are Altered Deliberately By Human Creativity. There Is No Attempt At Accuracy Of Copying, As With Genes - And As With Memes In Their Original Version.

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.

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?

[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.

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

Evolution Is Just A Theory? Well, So Is Gravity And I Don't See You Jumping Out Of Buildings.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life. Within Decades We Must Close Our Eyes Again. Isn’t It A Noble, An Enlightened Way Of Spending Our Brief Time In The Sun, To Work At Understanding The Universe And How We Have Come To Wake Up In It? This Is How I Answer When I Am Asked—as I Am Surprisingly Often—why I Bother To Get Up In The Mornings.

Evolution Could So Easily Be Disproved If Just A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Date Order. Evolution Has Passed This Test With Flying Colours.

Nowadays Theologians Aren't Quite So Straightforward As Paley. They Don't Point To Complex Living Mechanisms And Say That They Are Self-evidently Designed By A Creator, Just Like A Watch. But There Is A Tendency To Point To Them And Say 'it Is Impossible To Believe' That Such Complexity, Or Such Perfection, Could Have Evolved By Natural Selection. Whenever I Read Such A Remark, I Always Feel Like Writing 'speak For Yourself' In The Margin.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Can't See The Extraordinary Beauty Of The Idea That Life Started From Nothing - That Is Such A Staggering, Elegant, Beautiful Thing, Why Would You Want To Clutter It Up With Something So Messy As A God?

Extraordinary Beauty

Public Sharing Is An Important Part Of Science.

The Evidence For Evolution Is So Compelling That The Only Way To Save The Creation Theory Is To Assume That God Deliberately Planted Enormous Quantities Of Evidence To Make It Look As If Evolution Had Happened.

Enormous Quantities

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

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.

The Body Is A Survival Machine Programmed To Propagate The Genes That Reside Inside It.

When I Am Dying, I Should Like My Life Taken Out Under General Anaesthetic, Exactly As If It Were A Diseased Appendix.

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.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

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.

I Think That There Are Good Things That Happen And Bad Things That Happen.

Leaders Who Forbid Their Followers To Use Effective Contraceptive Methods 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.

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

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.

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

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 Detest 'jingle Bells,' 'white Christmas,' 'rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,' And The Obscene Spending Bonanza That Nowadays Seems To Occupy Not Just December, But November And Much Of October, Too.

There Is Something Infantile In The Presumption That Somebody Else Has A Responsibility To Give Your Life Meaning And Point… The Truly Adult View, By Contrast, Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It.

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.

I Think That [paul] Bloom's Approach - And Others Who Take It - Is Not So Much That There Is A Precise Genetic Basis To Faith. But There Is A Genetic Basis To A Psychological Predisposition That Manifests Itself As Faith And Religion Under The Right Conditions.

Having A Debate With A Modern Christian Is Like Punching A Sponge.

An Atheist Is Just Somebody Who Feels About Yahweh The Way Any Decent Christian Feels About Thor Or Baal Or The Golden Calf. We Are All Atheists About Most Of The Gods That Humanity Has Ever Believed In. Some Of Us Just Go One God Further.

It Is Possible In Medicine, Even When You Intend To Do Good, To Do Harm Instead. That Is Why Science Thrives On Actively Encouraging Criticism Rather Than Stifling It.

There Is No Such Thing As A Christian Child: Only A Child Of Christian Parents.

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.

[the Internet] Is By Far The Most Important Innovation In The Media In My Lifetime. It's Like Having A Huge Encyclopedia Permanently Available. There's A Tremendous Amount Of Rubbish On The World Wide Web, But Retrieval Of What You Want To So Rapid That It Doesn't Really Matter

It Is Raining Dna Outside. On The Bank Of The Oxford Canal At The Bottom Of My Garden Is A Large Willow Tree, And It Is Pumping Downy Seeds Into The Air. ... Spreading Dna Whose Coded Characters Spell Out Specific Instructions For Building Willow Trees That Will Shed A New Generation Of Downy Seeds. ... It Is Raining Instructions Out There; It's Raining Programs; It's Raining Tree-growing, Fluff-spreading, Algorithms. That Is Not A Metaphor, It Is The Plain Truth. It Couldn't Be Any Plainer If It Were Raining Floppy Discs.

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'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.

People Who Believe In God Conclude There Must Have Been A Divine Knob Twiddler Who Twiddled The Knobs Of These Half-dozen Constants To Get Them Exactly Right. The Problem Is That This Says, Because Something Is Vastly Improbable, We Need A God To Explain It. But That God Himself Would Be Even More Improbable.

I Think What Attracts Me About The Electric Monk Is That It's Such An Eloquent Example Of The Futility Of Belief For Belief's Sake. I Mean There's Only Any Point In Believing Something If It's True.

Religious Organisations Have An Automatic Tax-free Charitable Status.

Religion Is About Turning Untested Belief Into Unshakable Truth Through The Power Of Institutions And The Passage Of Time.

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

It Is Fashionable To Wax Apocalyptic About The Threat To Humanity Posed By The Aids Virus, "mad Cow" Disease, And Many Others, But I Think A Case Can Be Made That Faith Is One Of The World's Great Evils, Comparable To The Smallpox Virus But Harder To Eradicate.

Mad Cow Disease

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

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.

I Would, Like Any Other Scientist, Willingly Change My Mind If The Evidence Led Me To Do So. So I Care About What's True, I Care About Evidence, I Care About Evidence As The Reason For Knowing What Is True. It Is True That I Come Across Rather Passionate Sometimes - And That's Because I Am Passionate About The Truth... I Do Get Very Impatient With Humbug, With Cant, With Fakery, With Charlatans.

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

Religion Has Been A Powerful Weapon In The Hands Of Governments, In The Hands Of Priests, In The Hands Of Kings Who Have Used It As A Weapon To Keep Down The Populace. It Is A Wonderful Way Of Disciplining People And Making Them Do What You Want, To Tell Them That If They Don't Do What You Want They Will, For Example, Go To Hell.

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.

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

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

God Exists, If Only In The Form Of A Meme With High Survival Value, Or Infective Power, In The Environment Provided By Human Culture.

If You Don't Know Anything About Computers, Just Remember That They Are Machines That Do Exactly What You Tell Them But Often Surprise You In The Result.

This Person Should Have Been Aborted Years Ago.

Cheetah Genes Cooperate With Cheetah Genes But Not With Camel Genes, And Vice Versa. This Is Not Because Cheetah Genes, Even In The Most Poetic Sense, See Any Virtue In The Preservation Of The Cheetah Species. They Are Not Working To Save The Cheetah From Extinction Like Some Molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Such Is The Breathtaking Speciesism Of Our Christian-inspired Attitudes, The Abortion Of A Single Human Zygote Can Arouse More Moral Solicitude And Righteous Indignation Than The Vivasection Of Any Number Of Intelligent Adult Chimpanzees! The Only Reason We Can Be Comfortable With Such A Double Standard Is That The Intermediates Between Humans And Chimps Are All Dead.

By All Means Let's Be Open-minded, But Not So Open-minded That Our Brains Drop Out. -this Quote Is Actually Found In Carl Sagan's Book The Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark, Where He Attributes It To Engineer James Oberg, Who Says He Stole It From Someone Else.

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."

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

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.

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.

Evolution Is A Theory In A Special Philosophical Sense Of Science, But In Terms Of Ordinary Laymen's Use Of Language, It's A Fact, .. Evolution Is A Fact In The Same Sense That It's A Fact That The Earth Is Round And Not Flat, [that] The Earth Goes Round The Sun. Both Those Are Also Theories, But They're Theories That Have Never Been Disproved And Never Will Be Disproved.

We Cannot, Of Course, Disprove God, Just As We Can't Disprove Thor, Fairies, Leprechauns, And The Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, Like Those Other Fantasies That We Can't Disprove, We Can Say That God Is Very, Very Improbable.

If We Are Too Friendly To Nice, Decent Bishops, We Run The Risk Of Buying Into The Fiction That There's Something Virtuous About Believing Things Because Of Faith Rather Than Because Of Evidence. We Run The Risk Of Betraying Scientific Enlightenment.

I Do Like Philip Pullman.and That's An Exception Because Philip Pullman's Books Allow Magic.

Myths Are Fun, As Long As You Don't Confuse Them With The Truth.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Should Take Astrology Seriously. No, I Don't Mean We Should Believe In It. I Am Talking About Fighting It Seriously Instead Of Humouring It As A Piece Of Harmless Fun.

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.

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

Objective Truth

I Think We Don't Do A Service To Dialogue Between Science And Faith To Characterize Sincere People By Calling Them Names. That Inspires An Even More Dug-in Position.

Being Dead Will Be No Different From Being Unborn -- I Shall Be Just As I Was In The Time Of William The Conqueror Or The Dinosaurs Or The Trilobites. There Is Nothing To Fear In That.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

It Is Possible To Enjoy The Mozart Concerto Without Being Able To Play The Clarinet. In Fact, You Can Learn To Be An Expert Connoisseur Of Music Without Being Able To Play A Note On Any Instrument. Of Course, Music Would Come To A Halt If Nobody Ever Learned To Play It. But If Everybody Grew Up Thinking That Music Was Synonymous With Playing It, Think How Relatively Impoverished Many Lives Would Be. Couldn't We Learn To Think Of Science In The Same Way?

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

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

I Don't See That [richard] Dawkins' Basic Account Of Evolution Is Incompatible With God's Having Designed It.

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.

Religious Fanatics Want People To Switch Off Their Own Minds, Ignore The Evidence, And Blindly Follow A Holy Book Based Upon Private 'revelation'.

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.

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

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

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.

Let Our Tribute To The Dead Be A New Resolve: To Respect People For What They Individually Think, Rather Than Respect Groups For What They Were Collectively Brought Up To Believe.

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

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.

Mutation Is Random; Natural Selection Is The Very Opposite Of Random.

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

The Physicist's Problem Is The Problem Of Ultimate Origins And Ultimate Natural Laws. The Biologist's Problem Is The Problem Of Complexity.

We Are Survival Machines – Robot Vehicles Blindly Programmed To Preserve The Selfish Molecules Known As Genes. This Is A Truth Which Still Fills Me With Astonishment.

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.

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.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realise That We Are Apes. Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees And Gorillas Is Much More Recent Than Their Common Ancestor With The Asian Apes - The Gibbons And Orangutans. There Is No Natural Category That Includes Chimpanzees, Gorillas And Orangutans But Excludes Humans.

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.

Even If There Were No Actual Evidence In Favor Of The Darwinian Theory, We Should Still Be Justified In Preferring It Over All Rival Theories.

If The Universe Were Just Electrons And Selfish Genes, Meaningless Tragedies ... Are Exactly What We Should Expect, Along With Equally Meaningless Good Fortune. Such A Universe Would Be Neither Evil Nor Good In Intention ... The Universe We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil And No Good, Nothing But Blind Pitiless Indifference.

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.

Even Those Who Do Not, Or Cannot, Avail Themselves Of A Scientific Education, Choose To Benefit From The Technology That Is Made Possible By The Scientific Education Of Others.

...there Are No Natural Borderlines In Evolution. The Illusion Of A Borderline Is Created By The Fact That The Evolutionary Intermediates Happen To Be Extinct.

I Am An Enthusiastic Darwinian, But I Think Darwinism Is Too Big A Theory To Be Confined To The Narrow Context Of The Gene.

What Lies At The Heart Of Every Living Thing Is Not A Fire, Not Warm Breath, Not A 'spark Of Life.' It Is Information, Words, Instructions... If You Want To Understand Life, Don't Think About Vibrant, Throbbing Gels And Oozes, Think About Information Technology.

Five Per Cent Vision Is Better Than No Vision At All. Five Per Cent Hearing Is Better Than No Hearing At All. Five Per Cent Flight Efficiency Is Better Than No Flight At All. It Is Thoroughly Believable That Every Organ Or Apparatus That We Actually See Is The Product Of A Smooth Trajectory Through Animal Space, A Trajectory In Which Every Intermediate Stage Assisted Survival And Reproduction.

[alternative Medicine Is Defined As] That Set Of Practices That Cannot Be Tested, Refuse To Be Tested Or Consistently Fail Tests.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

The Replicators That Exist Tend To Be The Ones That Are Good At Manipulating The World To Their Own Advantage. But Other Replicators Are Also Successful Otherwise They Would Not Be Common. The World Therefore Tends To Become Populated By Mutually Compatible Sets Of Successful Replicators, Replicators That Get On Well Together

If Children Were Taught To Question And Think Through Their Beliefs, Instead Of Being Taught The Superior Virtue Of Faith Without Question, It Is A Good Bet That There Would Be No Suicide Bombers.

Just Because Science So Far Has Failed To Explain Something, Such As Consciousness, To Say It Follows That The Facile, Pathetic Explanations Which Religion Has Produced Somehow By Default Must Win The Argument Is Really Quite Ridiculous.

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.

My Personal Feeling Is That Understanding Evolution Led Me To Atheism.

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.

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.

I Think Nobody Would Claim That Random Genetic Drift Is Capable Of Producing Adaptation, That Is To Say The Illusion Of Design. Random Genetic Drift Can't Produce Wings That Are Good At Flying, Or Eyes That Are Good At Seeing, Or Legs That Are Good At Running. But Random Genetic Drift Probably Is Very Important In Driving Evolution At The Molecular Genetic Level.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I Really, Really Would Like To See Religion Go Away Altogether.

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

Only A Tiny Fraction Of Corpses Fossilize, And We Are Lucky To Have As Many Intermediate Fossils As We Do. We Could Easily Have Had No Fossils At All, And Still The Evidence For Evolution From Other Sources, Such As Molecular Genetics And Geographical Distribution, Would Be Overwhelmingly Strong. On The Other Hand, Evolution Makes The Strong Prediction That If A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Geological Stratum, The Theory Would Be Blown Out Of The Water.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those Who Wish To Base Their Morality Literally On The Bible Have Either Not Read It Or Not Understood It.

For Me, Moral Questions Such As Stem-cell Research Turn Upon Whether Suffering Is Caused. In This Case, Clearly None Is. The Embryos Have No Nervous System. But That's Not An Issue Discussed Publicly. The Issue Is, Are They Human? If You Are An Absolutist Moralist, You Say, "these Cells Are Human, And Therefore They Deserve Some Kind Of Special Moral Treatment."

It Is Quite True That Many Scientists, Many Physicists, Maintain That The Physical Constants, The Half Dozen Or So Numbers That Physicists Have To Simply Assume In Order To Derive The Rest Of Their Understanding ... Have To Be Assumed. You Can't Provide A Rationale For Why Those Numbers Are There. Physicists Have Calculated That If Any Of These Numbers Was A Little Bit Different, The Universe As We Know It Wouldn't Exist.

Creationists Are Possibly Gaining More Political Power. In The U.s., You Are Constantly Hearing Stories Of School Boards Harassing Teachers And Trying To Get Textbooks Banned.

People Who Criticize The Selfish Gene Like That Often Haven't Read It. The Selfish Gene Accounts For Altruism Toward Kin And Individuals Who Might Be In A Position To Reciprocate Your Altruism.

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

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

What I Am Skeptical About Is The Idea That Whatever Wonderful Revelation Does Come In The Science Of The Future, It Will Turn Out To Be One Of The Particular Historical Religions That People Happen To Have Dreamed Up.

Physicists Are Working On The Big Bang, And One Day They May Or May Not Solve It.

…the Genesis Story Is Just One That Happened To Have Been Adopted By One Particular Tribe Of Middle Eastern Herders. It Has No More Special Status Than The Belief Of A Particular West African Tribe That The World Was Created From The Excrement Of Ants.

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.

We Think We Know That Chimpanzees Are Higher Animals And Earthworms Are Lower, We Think We've Always Known What That Means, And We Think Evolution Makes It Even Clearer. But It Doesn't. It Is By No Means Clear That It Means Anything At All. Or If It Means Anything, It Means So Many Different Things To Be Misleading, Even Pernicious.

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Thought Provoking

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.

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?

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority.

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.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

I've Always Been Antagonistic To Any Naïve Application Of The Selfish Gene Theory To Politics. Some People Have Attempted To Suggest That It Means We Are Selfish Or We Should Be Selfish.

If You Don't Understand How Something Works, Never Mind: Just Give Up And Say God Did It. You Don't Know How The Nerve Impulse Works? Good! You Don't Understand How Memories Are Laid Down In The Brain? Excellent! Is Photosynthesis A Bafflingly Complex Process? Wonderful! Please Don't Go To Work On The Problem, Just Give Up, And Appeal To God.

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.

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

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