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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?

-Richard Dawkins

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I Think We Have

Richard Dawkins

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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?

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

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Explaining Is A Difficult Art. You Can Explain Something So That Your Reader Understands The Words; And You Can Explain Something So That The Reader Feels It In The Marrow Of His Bones. To Do The Latter, It Sometimes Isn't Enough To Lay The Evidence Before The Reader In A Dispassionate Way. You Have To Become An Advocate And Use The Tricks Of The Advocate's Trade.

Faith Is An Evil Precisely Because It Requires No Justification And Brooks No Argument.

I Would Challenge The Statement That My Scientific Instincts Are Any Less Rigorous Than [richard Dawkins]. The Difference Is That My Presumption Of The Possibility Of God And Therefore The Supernatural Is Not Zero, And Yours Is.

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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.

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).

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

There Is No God

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

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

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 Am Trying To Call Attention To The Elephant In The Room That Everybody Is Too Polite - Or Too Devout - To Notice: Religion, And Specifically The Devaluing Effect That Religion Has On Human Life.

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.

There May Be Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden. There Is No Evidence For It, But You Can't Prove That There Aren't Any, So Shouldn't We Be Agnostic With Respect To Fairies?

I Don't Shout People Down. I Argue People Down, Perhaps.

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.

I Think That's The Mother And Father Of All Cop-outs. It's An Honest Scientific Quest To Discover Where This Apparent Improbability Comes From. Now [francis] Collins Says, "well, God Did It. And God Needs No Explanation Because God Is Outside All This." Well, What An Incredible Evasion Of The Responsibility To Explain. Scientists Don't Do That. Scientists Say, "we're Working On It. We're Struggling To Understand."

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Human Psychology Has A Near Universal Tendency To Let Belief Be Coloured By Desire.

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

Dangerous Ideas

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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.

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Two Religions Cannot Both Be Right, Because They Contradict Each Other, Yet They Can Both Be Wrong.

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'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

The Meme For Blind Faith Secures Its Own Perpetuation By The Simple Unconscious Expedient Of Discouraging Rational Inquiry.

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 Remember At The Age Of Six Regaling My Poor Little Sister With Stories About The Planets, And How Far Away They Were And Which Ones Might Have Life.

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.

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

Just Imagine The Banner Headlines If A Marine Biologist Were To Discover A Species Of Dolphin That Wove Large, Intricately Meshed Fishing Nets, Twenty Dolphin-lengths In Diameter! Yet We Take A Spider Web For Granted, As A Nuisance In The House Rather Than As One Of The Wonders Of The World. And Think Of The Furore If Jane Goodall Returned From Gombe Stream With Photographs Of Wild Chimpanzees Building Their Own Houses, Well Roofed And Insulated, Of Painstakingly Selected Stones Neatly Bonded And Mortared! Yet Caddis Larvae, Who Do Precisely That, Command Only Passing Interest.

The Majority Of Children Born Into The World Tend To Inherit The Beliefs Of Their Parents, And That To Me Is One Of The Most Regrettable Facts Of Them All

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.

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.

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

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.

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There Is An Attitude In The Culture That Says That Everybody Is Entitled To Their Opinion. You Got To Respect Their Opinion. No, You Damn Well Haven't Got To Respect Their Opinion.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries, We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life.

My Passion Is For Scientific Truth. I Don't Much Care About Good And Evil. ... I Care About What's True.

Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

Science And Religion

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.

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.

Though The Details Differ Across The World, No Known Culture Lacks Some Version Of The Time-consuming, Wealth Consuming, Hostility Provoking Rituals, The Anti-factual, Counter-productive Fantasies Of Religion.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life. Because I Do Believe In God's Creative Power In Having Brought It All Into Being In The First Place, I Find That Studying The Natural World Is An Opportunity To Observe The Majesty, The Elegance, The Intricacy Of God's Creation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I Do Not Believe There Is An Atheist In The World Who Would Bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster Or Notre Dame, The Shwe Dagon, The Temples Of Kyoto Or, Of Course, The Buddhas Of Bamiyan.

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 Idea Of Tiny Changes Cumulated Over Many Steps Is An Immensely Powerful Idea, Capable Of Explaining An Enormous Range Of Things That Would Be Otherwise Inexplicable.

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.

Of Course You Can Have An Opinion About Islam Without Having Read Qur'an. You Don't Have To Read Mein Kampf To Have An Opinion About Nazism.

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.

[creationists Have] Lost In The Courts Of Law; They've Long Ago Lost In The Halls Of Science; And They Continue To Lose With Every New Piece Of Evidence In Support Of Evolution. Taking Offense Is All They've Got Left.

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.

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.

How Any Government Could Promote The Vardy Academies In The North-east Of England Is Absolutely Beyond Me. Tony Blair Defends Them On Grounds Of Diversity, But It Should Be Unthinkable In The 21st Century To Have A School Whose Head Of Science Believes The World Is Less Than 10,000 Years Old.

As My Colleague, The Physical Chemist Peter Atkins, Puts It, We Must Be Equally Agnostic About The Theory That There Is A Teapot In Orbrit Around The Planet Pluto. We Can't Disprove It. But That Doesn't Mean The Theory That There Is A Teapot Is On Level Terms With The Theory That There Isn't.

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

The Human Psyche Has Two Great Sicknesses: The Urge To Carry Vendetta Across Generations, And The Tendency To Fasten Group Labels On People Rather Than See Them As Individuals.

If You Listen To Two People Who Are Arguing About Something, And They Each Of Them Have Passionate Faith That They're Right, But They Believe Different Things---they Belong To Different Religions, Different Faiths, There Is Nothing They Can Do To Settle Their Disagreement Short Of Shooting Each Other, Which Is What They Very Often Actually Do.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

The Fact That Life Evolved Out Of Nearly Nothing, Some 10 Billion Years After The Universe Evolved Out Of Literally Nothing, Is A Fact So Staggering That I Would Be Mad To Attempt Words To Do It Justice.

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.

American Political Opportunities Are Loaded Against Those Who Are Simultaneously Intelligent And Honest.

Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born

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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.

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Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

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

There Is Enough Information Capacity In A Single Human Cell To Store The Encyclopedia Britannica, All 30 Volumes Of It, Three Or Four Times Over.

Encyclopedia Britannica

Reductionism Is A Dirty Word, And A Kind Of 'holistier Than Thou' Self-righteousness Has Become Fashionable.

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.

Religious Faith, Is A State Of Mind, That Leads People To Believe In Something, It Doesn't Matter What, Without A Whisper Of Doubt, Or A Whiff Of Evidence, And Believe So Strongly In Some Cases, That They Are Prepare To Kill And Die For It, Without The Need For Further Justification.

The More Statistically Improbable A Thing Is, The Less We Can Believe That It Just Happened By Blind Chance. Superficially, The Obvious Alternative To Chance Is An Intelligent Designer.

Nothing Is Wrong With Peace And Love. It Is All The More Regrettable That So Many Of Christ's Followers Seem To Disagree.

Dna Neither Cares Nor Knows. Dna Just Is. And We Dance To Its Music.

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.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

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?

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

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.

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

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'.

St. Augustine Wrote That Basically It Is Not Possible To Understand What Was Being Described In Genesis. It Was Not Intended As A Science Textbook. It Was Intended As A Description Of Who God Was, Who We Are And What Our Relationship Is Supposed To Be With God.

Physicists Have Come Up With Other Explanations. One Is To Say That These Six Constants Are Not Free To Vary. Some Unified Theory Will Eventually Show That They Are As Locked In As The Circumference And The Diameter Of A Circle. That Reduces The Odds Of Them All Independently Just Happening To Fit The Bill.

If Ever There Was A Slamming Of The Door In The Face Of Constructive Investigation, It Is The Word Miracle. To A Medieval Peasant, A Radio Would Have Seemed Like A Miracle.

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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.

I Respect You Too Much To Respect Your Ridiculous Ideas.

Our Leaders Have Described The Recent Atrocity With The Customary Cliche: Mindless Cowardice. Mindless May Be A Suitable Word For The Vandalising Of A Telephone Box. It Is Not Helpful For Understanding What Hit New York On September 11. Those People Were Not Mindless And They Were Certainly Not Cowards. On The Contrary, They Had Sufficiently Effective Minds Braced With An Insane Courage, And It Would Pay Us Mightily To Understand Where That Courage Came From. It Came From Religion.

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

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

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.

Our Brains Have Evolved To Help Us Survive Within The Orders Of Magnitude Of Size And Speed Which Our Bodies Operate At. We Never Evolved To Navigate In The World Of Atoms.

Unfortunately, However Much We May Deplore Something, It Does Not Stop Being True.

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.

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.

The Atheist View Is Correspondingly Life-affirming And Life-enhancing, While At The Same Time Never Being Tainted With Self-delusion, Wishful Thinking, Or The Whingeing Self-pity Of Those Who Feel That Life Owes Them Something.

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.

Faith Can Be Very Very Dangerous, And Deliberately To Implant It Into The Vulnerable Mind Of An Innocent Child Is A Grievous Wrong.

The Obvious Objections To The Execution Of Saddam Hussein Are Valid And Well Aired. His Death Will Provoke Violent Strife Between Sunni And Shia Muslims, And Between Iraqis In General And The American Occupation Forces.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

The So-called Sophisticated Theologians, Especially Ones Who Are Very Nice, Like Rowan Williams And Jonathan Sacks, You Sometimes Don't Quite Know Where You Are With Them. You Feel That When You Attack Them, You're Attacking A Wet Sponge.

In Britain You Don't Usually Learn About Evolution Until You Are About 15. I Should Have Thought That You Should Start At About 8. But I Could Be Wrong About That.

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.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

It Is Important Not To Confuse Race And Religion.

Race And Religion

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If It Is Solely An Evolutionary Convenience, There Is Really No Such Thing As Good Or Evil.

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

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

It Is All Too Easy To Mistake Passion That Can Change Its Mind For Fundamentalism, Which Never Will.

Writing A Computer Virus Program Is Child's Play. Any Fool Can Do It, Which Is Why The Silly Little Twerps Who Do Have Nothing To Be Proud Of.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

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

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

People Who Believe The Earth Was Created 6000 Years Ago, When It's Actually 4.5 Billion Years Old, Should Also Believe The Width Of North America Is 8 Yards. That Is The Scale Of The Error.

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.

I Speak As A Private Citizen And Not As A Representative Of The Executive Branch Of The United States Government. The Impression That People Of Faith Are Uniformly Opposed To Stem-cell Research Is Not Documented By Surveys. In Fact, Many People Of Strong Religious Conviction Think This Can Be A Morally Supportable Approach.

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

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?

...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.

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?

The Very Idea That We Get A Moral Compass From Religion Is Horrible. Not Only Should We Not Get Our Moral Compass From Religion, As A Matter Of Fact We Don't.

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

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.

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 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.

[if] There Is Mercy In Nature, It Is Accidental. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

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

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.

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.

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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.

Nobody Would Seriously Describe A Tiny Child As A Marxist Child Or An Anarchist Child Or A Post-modernist Child. Yet Children Are Routinely Labelled With The Religion Of Their Parents. We Need To Encourage People To Think Carefully Before Labelling Any Child Too Young To Know Their Own Opinions And Our Adverts Will Help To Do That.

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.

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

I Am Thrilled To Be Alive At Time When Humanity Is Pushing Against The Limits Of Understanding. Even Better, We May Eventually Discover That There Are No Limits.

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!

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

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

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Frances Hodgson Burnett

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