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If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

-Richard Dawkins

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If You Are Offended

Richard Dawkins

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If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

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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 Had Always Been Scrupulously Careful To Avoid The Smallest Suggestion Of Infant Indoctrination, Which I Think Is Ultimately Responsible For Much Of The Evil In The World. Others, Less Close To Her, Showed No Such Scruples, Which Upset Me, As I Very Much Wanted Her, As I Want All Children, To Make Up Her Own Mind Freely When She Became Old Enough To Do So. I Would Encourage Her To Think, Without Telling Her What To Think.

'take Offense At The Drop Of A Hat' Is The Unwritten Eleventh Commandment.

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

We've All Been Brought Up With The View That Religion Has Some Kind Of Special Privileged Status. You're Not Allowed To Criticise It.

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.

If You Want To Do Bad Things, Science Is The Most Powerful Way To Do Them.

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.

To Illustrate The Vain Conceit That The Universe Must Be Somehow Pre-ordained For Us, Because We Are So Well-suited To Live In It, He [douglas Adams] Mimed A Wonderfully Funny Imitation Of A Puddle Of Water, Fitting Itself Snugly Into A Depression In The Ground, The Depression Uncannily Being Exactly The Same Shape As The Puddle.

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.

In True Natural Selection, If A Body Has What It Takes To Survive, Its Genes Automatically Survive Because They Are Inside It. So The Genes That Survive Tend To Be, Automatically, Those Genes That Confer On Bodies The Qualities That Assist Them To Survive.

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.

What Has Happened Is That Genetics Has Become A Branch Of Information Technology. It Is Pure Information. It's Digital Information. It's Precisely The Kind Of Information That Can Be Translated Digit For Digit, Byte For Byte, Into Any Other Kind Of Information And Then Translated Back Again. This Is A Major Revolution. I Suppose It's Probably "the" Major Revolution In The Whole History Of Our Understanding Of Ourselves. It's Something Would Have Boggled The Mind Of Darwin, And Darwin Would Have Loved It, I'm Absolutely Sure.

Such A Bandwidth! God, Who May Not Have A Brain Made Of Neurons, Or A Cpu Made Of Silicon, But If He Has The Powers Attributed To Him He Must Have Something Far More Elaborately And Non-randomly Constructed Than The Largest Brain Or The Largest Computer We Know.

The True Scientific Understanding Of The Nature Of Existence Is So Utterly Fascinating; How Could You Not Want People To Share It? Carl Sagan, I Think, Said 'when You're In Love, You Want To Tell The World.' And Who, On Understanding A Scientific View Of Reality, Would Not, As It Were, Fall In Love And Want To Tell The World.

Falling In Love

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.

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'.

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.

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.

At The Deepest Level, All Living Things That Have Ever Been Looked At Have The Same Dna Code. And Many Of The Same Genes.

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

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

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There Is Great Variation In Brain Power All The Way From Einstien On One Hand To Sarah Palin On The Other.

If You're Willing To Answer Yes To A God Outside Of Nature, Then There's Nothing Inconsistent With God On Rare Occasions Choosing To Invade The Natural World In A Way That Appears Miraculous.

I Think A Fundamentalist Is Somebody Who Believes Something Unshakably And Isn't Going To Change Their Mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Fundamentalist Religion

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

Just Because Science Can't In Practice Explain Things Like The Love That Motivates A Poet To Write A Sonnet, That Doesn't Mean That Religion Can. It's A Simple And Logical Fallacy To Say, "if Science Can't Do Something Therefore Religion Can.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

Evolution Has Been Observed. It's Just That It Hasn't Been Observed While It's Happening.

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Meaning.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Certainly I See The Scientific View Of The World As Incompatible With Religion, But That Is Not What Is Interesting About It. It Is Also Incompatible With Magic, But That Also Is Not Worth Stressing. 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.

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

When You Plant A Fertile Meme In My Mind You Literally Parasitize My Brain, Turning It Into A Vehicle For The Meme's Propagation In Just The Way That A Virus May Parasitize The Genetic Mechanism Of A Host Cell.

If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Like Computer Viruses, Successful Mind Viruses Will Tend To Be Hard For Their Victims To Detect. If You Are The Victim Of One, The Chances Are That You Won't Know It, And May Even Vigorously Deny It.

You Could Give Aristotle A Tutorial. And You Could Thrill Him To The Core Of His Being. Aristotle Was An Encyclopedic Polymath, An All Time Intellect. Yet Not Only Can You Know More Than Him About The World, You Also Can Have A Deeper Understanding Of How Everything Works. Such Is The Privilege Of Living After Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick And Their Colleagues.

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.

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

The Gravitational Constant, If It Were Off By One Part In A Hundred Million Million, Then The Expansion Of The Universe After The Big Bang Would Not Have Occurred In The Fashion That Was Necessary For Life To Occur. When You Look At That Evidence, It Is Very Difficult To Adopt The View That This Was Just Chance.

Religion Teaches You To Be Satisfied With Nonanswers. It’s A Sort Of Crime Against Childhood.

If You Are In The Camp I Am, One Place Where Science And Faith Could Touch Each Other Is In The Investigation Of Supposedly Miraculous Events.

I Have A Strong Feeling That The Subject Of Evolution Is Beautiful Without The Excuse Of Creationists Needing To Be Bashed.

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

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.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

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

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

[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.

That Was Unfortunate. I Should Have Compared Religion With Religion And Compared Islam Not With Trinity College But With Jews, Because The Number Of Jews Who Have Won Nobel Prizes Is Phenomenally High.

The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve - Which Runs From The Head To The Voice Box - Goes All The Way Down Into The Chest, Loops Around A Major Artery, Then Goes All The Way Back Up Again. It Goes Right Past The Larynx On The Way Down. All A Decent Designer Would Have To Do Is Loop It Off At That Point. What We're Looking At Is The Legacy Of History.

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

[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.

What You Cannot Have Is A Gene That Sacrifices Itself For The Benefit Of Other Genes. What You Can Have Is A Gene That Makes Organisms Sacrifice Themselves For Other Organisms Under The Influence Of Selfish Genes.

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.

My Untidy Habits Drive Me To Follow The Slash-and-burn Principle. Work On A Virgin Table Until The Mess Becomes Unbearable, Then Move On To A Clean Table In A Clean Room - Or, On A Beautiful Summer Day Like This, One Of The Five Tables Dotted Around The Garden. Trash That Table And Move On Again.

The God Of The Old Testament Is Arguably The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction.

I Guess There Are Some Rights Of Parents With What They Choose Their Children To Learn, But I'm Biased In Favor Of Freeing Children To Learn And Not Letting Parents Be Too Doctrinaire In Indoctrinating Their Children.

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

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

A God Capable Of Continuously Monitoring And Controlling The Individual Status Of Every Particle In The Universe Cannot Be Simple. His Existence Is Going To Need A Mammoth Explanation In Its Own Right.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Do Humans Have A Different Moral Significance Than Cows In General?

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

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.

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

In Other Words Luke's Story Is Historically Impossible And Internally Inconsistent. He Lied To Fudge The Fulfillment Of Micah's Prophesy And To Provide A Villain To Play Off Jesus In His Fictitious Drama. Matter Flows From Place To Place And Momentarily Comes Together To Be You. Some People Find That Thought Disturbing. I Find The Reality Thrilling.

Do Those People Who Hold Up The Bible As An Inspiration To Moral Rectitude Have The Slightest Notion Of What Is Actually Written In It?

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.

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

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

The Word 'mundane' Has Come To Mean 'boring' And 'dull', And It Really Shouldn't - It Should Mean The Opposite. Because It Comes From The Latin Mundus, Meaning 'the World'. And The World Is Anything But Dull: The World Is Wonderful. There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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.

Chaos Theory, A More Recent Invention, Is Equally Fertile Ground For Those With A Bent For Abusing Sense. It Is Unfortunately Named, For 'chaos' Implies Randomness. Chaos In The Technical Sense Is Not Random At All. It Is Completely Determined, But It Depends Hugely, In Strangely Hard-to-predict Ways, On Tiny Differences In Initial Conditions.

Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle.

If You Are Religious At All, It Is Overwhelmingly Probable That Your Religion Is That Of Your Parents. If You Were Born In Arkansas And You Think Christianity Is True And Islam False (knowing Full Well That You Would Think The Opposite If You Had Been Born In Afghanistan), You Are The Victim Of Childhood Indoctrination.

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.

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.

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

Absolutist Morality Doesn't Have To Come From Religion But Usually Does.

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 Children Understand That Beliefs Should Be Substantiated With Evidence, As Opposed To Tradition, Authority, Revelation Or Faith, They Will Automatically Work Out For Themselves That They Are Atheists.

What Is The Purpose Of The Universe?" Is A Silly Question.

[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.

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?

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

Imagine A Crime Series In Which, Every Week, There Is A White Suspect And A Black Suspect. And Every Week, Lo And Behold, The Black One Turns Out To Have Done It. Unpardonable, Of Course. And My Point Is That You Could Not Defend It By Saying: "but It's Only Fiction, Only Entertainment."

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.

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

Certainly Science Should Continue To See Whether We Can Find Evidence For Multiverses That Might Explain Why Our Own Universe Seems To Be So Finely Tuned.

My Decision To Be A Scientist Was A Bit Of A Drift Really, More Or Less By Default.

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'.

The Trouble With Conspiracies, Even Those That Are To Everybody's Advantage In The Long Run, Is That They Are Open To Abuse. If Manipulators Really Had The Powers Claimed, They Could Win The Lottery Every Week. I Prefer To Point Out That They Could Also Win A Nobel Prize For Discovering Fundamental Physical Forces Hitherto Unknown To Science.

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.

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

We 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.

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.

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

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!

Maybe Somewhere In Some Other Galaxy There Is A Super-intelligence So Colossal That From Our Point Of View It Would Be A God. But It Cannot Have Been The Sort Of God That We Need To Explain The Origin Of The Universe, Because It Cannot Have Been There That Early.

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

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

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.

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

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!

If We Want To Postulate A Deity Capable Of Engineering All The Organized Complexity In The World, Either Instantaneously Or By Guiding Evolution, That Deity Must Have Been Vastly Complex In The First Place. The Creationist, Whether A Naive Bible-thumper Or An Educated Bishop, Simply Postulates An Already Existing Being Of Prodigious Intelligence And Complexity. If We Are Going To Allow Ourselves The Luxury Of Postulating Organized Complexity Without Offering An Explanation, We Might As Well Make A Job Of It And Simply Postulate The Existence Of Life As We Know It!

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

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.

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.

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.

All The World’s Muslims Have Fewer Nobel Prizes Than Trinity College, Cambridge. They Did Great Things In The Middle Ages, Though.

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.

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 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.

The Bible Should Be Taught, But Emphatically Not As Reality. It Is Fiction, Myth, Poetry, Anything But Reality. As Such It Needs To Be Taught Because It Underlies So Much Of Our Literature And Our Culture.

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.

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.

I'm A Sucker For Nice Religious Leaders. I Fall For It Every Time.

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

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.

I Think I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

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

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.

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.

There May Be Some Deep Questions About The Cosmos That Are Forever Beyond Science. The Mistake Is To Think They Are Therefore Not Beyond Religion Too.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

If There Is A God, It's Going To Be A Whole Lot Bigger And A Whole Lot More Incomprehensible Than Anything That Any Theologian Of Any Religion Has Ever Proposed.

If There Is A God

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

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?

I Think Douglas [adams] Is Writing With An Eye To Irony For Adults At The Same Time As Entertaining Children.

Quantum Mechanics, That Brilliantly Successful Flagship Theory Of Modern Science, Is Deeply Mysterious And Hard To Understand. Eastern Mystics Have Always Been Deeply Mysterious And Hard To Understand. Therefore, Eastern Mystics Must Have Been Talking About Quantum Theory All Along.

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.

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.

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 Who Believe In Something For Which There Is Not A Shred Of Evidence Act On That Belief And, Above All, Impose Their Beliefs On Others, They Make Me Cross, And They Make Me Especially Cross When They Impose Their Beliefs On Defenceless Children.

When I Sign Books, I Get Lines Of People And What They Usually Say Is: "thank You. You Have Changed My Life." I Am Really Moved By That.

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!

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

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

The Rule Of Thumb Based Into The Brain By Natural Selection Would Not Have Been, Be Nice To Your Kin And Be Nice To Potential Reciprocators. It Would Have Been, Be Nice To Everybody, Because Everybody Would Have Been Included.

A Designer God Cannot Be Used To Explain Organized Complexity Because Any God Capable Of Designing Anything Would Have To Be Complex Enough To Demand The Same Kind Of Explanation In His Own Right.

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.

Evolution Is A Fact, As Securely Established As Any In Science, And He Who Denies It Betrays Woeful Ignorance And Lack Of Education, Which Likely Extends To Other Fields As Well.

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.

Religion Is Unusual Among Divisive Labels In Being Spectacularly Unnecessary. If Religious Beliefs Had Any Evidence Going For Them, We Might Have To Respect Them In Spite Of Their Concomitant Unpleasantness. But There Is No Such Evidence. To Label People As Death-deserving Enemies Because Of Disagreements About Real World Politics Is Bad Enough. To Do The Same For Disagreements About A Delusional World Inhabited By Archangels, Demons And Imaginary Friends Is Ludicrously Tragic.

You Can Never Be Absolutely Certain That Anything Doesn't Exist. But You Can Show That It's Unlikely.

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

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).

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

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.

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

I Don't Feel Depressed. I Feel Elated.

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

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.

In Two Senses: One Is That You Cannot Go On The Street And Shout That You Are An Atheist, The Other Is That You Are Never Given The Intellectual Framework For Calling Your Faith Into Question.

It Is Almost As If The Human Brain Were Specifically Designed To Misunderstand Darwinism, And To Find It Hard To Believe

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.

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.

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