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

-Richard Dawkins

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Luke [the Gospel Writer]

Richard Dawkins

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

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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.

Scientific And Technological Progress Themselves Are Value-neutral. They Are Just Very Good At Doing What They Do. If You Want To Do Selfish, Greedy, Intolerant And Violent Things, Scientific Technology Will Provide You With By Far The Most Efficient Way Of Doing So. But If You Want To Do Good, To Solve The World's Problems, To Progress In The Best Value-laden Sense, Once Again, There Is No Better Means To Those Ends Than The Scientific Way.

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

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

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?

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.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

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.

When We Started Out And We Were Talking About The Origins Of The Universe And The Physical Constants, I Provided What I Thought Were Cogent Arguments Against A Supernatural Intelligent Designer. But It Does Seem To Me To Be A Worthy Idea.

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

Religion Is The Root Of Quite A Lot Of Evil.

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.

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.

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

It Is A Virtue To Admit Ignorance When You Don't Know, But Not To Wallow In Ignorance As An End In Itself. People Say If We Don't Believe God Is Watching Over Us, We Abandon Morality. Are They Right?

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.

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

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

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

Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Can Never Hurt Me." The Adage Is True As Long As You Don't Really Believe The Words. But If Your Whole Upbringing, And Everything You Have Ever Been Told By Parents, Teachers And Priests, Has Led You To Believe, Really Believe, Utterly And Completely, That Sinners Burn In Hell (or Some Other Obnoxious Article Of Doctrine Such As That A Woman Is The Property Of Her Husband), It Is Entirely Plausible That Words Could Have A More Long-lasting And Damaging Effect Than Deeds.

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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

If You Want To Do Evil, Science Provides The Most Powerful Weapons To Do Evil; But Equally, If You Want To Do Good, Science Puts Into Your Hands The Most Powerful Tools To Do So

Atheists Are The New Gays; In The Closet And Pretty Much Disqualified From Public Office.

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

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.

Each Step Is Not Too Improbable For Us To Countenance, But When You Add Them Up Cumulatively Over Millions Of Years, You Get These Monsters Of Improbability, Like The Human Brain And The Rain Forest. It Should Warn Us Against Ever Again Assuming That Because Something Is Complicated, God Must Have Done It.

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

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

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?

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

Isaac Asimov's Remark About The Infantilism Of Pseudoscience Is Just As Applicable To Religion: 'inspect Every Piece Of Pseudoscience And You Will Find A Security Blanket, A Thumb To Suck, A Skirt To Hold.' It Is Astonishing, Moreover, How Many People Are Unable To Understand That 'x Is Comforting' Does Not Imply 'x Is True'.

The Genetic Code Is Not A Binary Code As In Computers, Nor An Eight-level Code As In Some Telephone Systems, But A Quaternary Code With Four Symbols. The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computerlike.

I Do Believe That Nice Religious People Make The World Safe For Extremists By Teaching Us [...] That Faith Is A Virtue, Teaching Us That There's Something Good About Holding Beliefs Without Any Substantiating Evidence. Once You Buy Into That, [...] Then The Door Is Opened To Extremists Who Defend Their Extremism By Saying, 'oh Well, It's My Faith, You Can't Touch It, You Can't Criticise My Faith, I Don't Even Need To Defend It Because Faith Is Faith.'

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

Not Only Is Science Corrosive To Religion, But Religion Is Corrosive To Science. It Teaches People To Be Satisfied With Trivial Non-explanations And Blinds Them To The Wonderful Real Explanations That We Have Within Our Grasp.

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."

My Objection To Supernatural Beliefs Is Precisely That They Miserably Fail To Do Justice To The Sublime Grandeur Of The Real World. They Represent A Narrowing-down From Reality, An Impoverishment Of What The Real World Has To Offer.

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.

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

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.

Individuals Are Not Stable Things, They Are Fleeting. Chromosomes Too Are Shuffled Into Oblivion, Like Hands Of Cards Soon After They Are Dealt. But The Cards Themselves Survive The Shuffling. The Cards Are The Genes. The Genes Are Not Destroyed By Crossing-over, They Merely Change Partners And March On. Of Course They March On. That Is Their Business. They Are The Replicators And We Are Their Survival Machines. When We Have Served Our Purpose We Are Cast Aside. But Genes Are Denizens Of Geological Time: Genes Are Forever.

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

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.

Francis [collins] Keeps Saying Things Like "from The Perspective Of A Believer." Once You Buy Into The Position Of Faith, Then Suddenly You Find Yourself Losing All Of Your Natural Skepticism And Your Scientific - Really Scientific - Credibility. I'm Sorry To Be So Blunt.

Finding Yourself

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

The 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.

I Think Looking Back To My Own Childhood, The Fact That So Many Of The Stories I Read Allowed The Possibility Of Frogs Turning Into Princes, Whether That Has A Sort Of Insidious Affect On Rationality, I'm Not Sure. Perhaps It's Something For Research.

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.

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

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

If I Were God Wanting To Make A Human Being, I Would Do It By A More Direct Way Rather Than By Evolution. Why Deliberately Set It Up In The One Way Which Makes It Look As Though You Don't Exist?

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.

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

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

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

I Do Think The Roman Catholic Religion Is A Disease Of The Mind Which Has A Particular Epidemiology Similar To That Of A Virus... Religion Is A Terrific Meme. That's Right. But That Doesn't Make It True And I Care About What's True. Smallpox Virus Is A Terrific Virus. It Does Its Job Magnificently Well. That Doesn't Mean That It's A Good Thing. It Doesn't Mean That I Don't Want To See It Stamped Out.

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

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.

If Circumcision Has Any Justification At All, It Should Be Medical Only. Parents' Religion Is The Worst Of All Reasons - Pure Child Abuse.

Or Why It Is Acceptable To Train Fast Runners And High Jumpers But Not To Breed Them. I Can Think Of Some Answers, And They Are Good Ones, Which Would Probably End Up Persuading Me. But Hasn't The Time Come When We Should Stop Being Frightened Even To Put The Question?

I Don't Feel Depressed. I Feel Elated.

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.

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

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

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.

My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

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

We Are Machines Built By Dna Whose Purpose Is To Make More Copies Of The Same Dna. ... This Is Exactly What We Are For. We Are Machines For Propagating Dna, And The Propagation Of Dna Is A Self-sustaining Process. It Is Every Living Object's Sole Reason For Living.

There Are People In The World Who Desperately Want Not To Have To Believe In Darwinism .

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

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

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

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.

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

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think.

…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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

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

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."

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

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

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

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Think That [jay] Gould's Separate Compartments Was A Purely Political Ploy To Win Middle-of-the-road Religious People To The Science Camp. But It's A Very Empty Idea. There Are Plenty Of Places Where Religion Does Not Keep Off The Scientific Turf.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

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.

Science May Be Weird And Incomprehensible--more Weird And Less Comprehensible Than Any Theology--but Science Works. It Gets Results. It Can Fly You To Saturn, Slingshotting You Around Venus And Jupiter On The Way. We May Not Understand Quantum Theory (heaven Knows, I Don't), But A Theory That Predicts The Real World To Ten Decimal Places Cannot In Any Straightforward Sense Be Wrong.

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

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

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.

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

All The Great Religions Have A Place For Awe, For Ecstatic Transport At The Wonder And Beauty Of Creation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Theory Of Evolution By Cumulative Natural Selection Is The Only Theory We Know Of That Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining The Existence Of Organized Complexity.

Theory Of Evolution

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

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.

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

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

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

I Think By The Age Of About Nine I Recognized That There Were A Lot Of Different Religions, And It Was An Accident I Happened To Be Born Into One Of Them. If I Had Been Born Somewhere Else, I Would Have Had A Different One. Which Is A Pretty Good Lesson, Actually. Everyone Should Learn That.

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

I Would Like To Find A Way In Which People In Saudi Arabia Could Learn That They Can Be Something Other Than A Muslim. Some People May Not Realize This. Of Course, There Is The Problem That You Can Get In Trouble Or Get Stoned.

Metaphors Are Fine If They Aid Understanding, But Sometimes They Get In The Way.

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

So It Is Best To Keep An Open Mind And Be Agnostic. At First Sight That Seems An Unassailable Position, At Least In The Weak Sense Of Pascal's Wager. But On Second Thoughts It Seems A Cop-out, Because The Same Could Be Said Of Father Christmas And Tooth Fairies. 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Universe With A God Would Look Quite Different From A Universe Without One. A Physics, A Biology Where There Is A God Is Bound To Look Different. So The Most Basic Claims Of Religion Are Scientific. Religion Is A Scientific Theory.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Effective Searching Procedures Become, When The Search-space Is Sufficiently Large, Indistinguishable From True Creativity.

Natural Selection Is The Blind Watchmaker, Blind Because It Does Not See Ahead, Does Not Plan Consequences, Has No Purpose In View. Yet The Living Results Of Natural Selection Overwhelmingly Impress Us With The Appearance Of Design As If By A Master Watchmaker, Impress Us With The Illusion Of Design And Planning.

I Respect You Too Much To Respect Your Ridiculous Ideas.

[it] Is Capable Of Driving People To Such Dangerous Folly That Faith Seems To Me To Qualify As A Kind Of Mental Illness.

[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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Bertrand Russell Used A Hypothetical Teapot In Orbit About Mars For The Same Didactic Purpose. You Have To Be Agnostic About The Teapot, But That Doesn't Mean You Treat The Likelihood Of Its Existence As Being On All Fours With Its Non-existence.

If You Were To Actually Travel Around Schools And Universities And Listen In On Lectures About Evolution You Might Find A Fairly Substantial Fraction Of Young People, Without Knowing What It Is They Disapprove Of, Think They Disapprove Of It, Because They've Been Brought Up To.

I Like To Think 'the God Delusion' Is A Humorous Book. I Think, Actually, It's Full Of Laughs. And People Who Describe It As A Polarizing Book Or As An Aggressive Book, It's Just That Very Often They Haven't Read It.

...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 Do Understand People When They Say That You Destroy The Magic Of Childhood If You Encourage Too Much Skeptical Questioning.

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

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

The Mob Hysteria Over Pedophiles Has Reached Epidemic Proportions And Driven Parents To Panic. Today's Just Williams, Today's Huck Finns, Today's Swallows And Amazons Are Deprived Of The Freedom To Roam That Was One Of The Delights Of Childhood In Earlier Times (when The Actual, As Opposed To The Perceived, Risk Of Molestation Was Probably No Less).

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.

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.

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

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

I Doubt That Religion Can Survive Deep Understanding. The Shallows Are Its Natural Habitat. Cranks And Fundamentalists Are Too Often Victimised As Scapegoats For Religion In General. It Is Only Quite Recently That Christianity Reinvented Itself In Non-fundamentalist Guise, And Islam Has Yet To Do So.

Deep Understanding

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

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

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

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.

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

Anything And Everything

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish. Let Us Understand What Our Own Selfish Genes Are Up To, Because We May Then At Least Have The Chance To Upset Their Designs, Something That No Other Species Has Ever Aspired To Do.

Who Will Say With Confidence That Sexual Abuse Is More Permanently Damaging To Children Than Threatening Them With The Eternal And Unquenchable Fires Of Hell?

People Sometimes Try To Score Debating Points By Saying, Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Correct, But It's Important To Understand What That Means. It Is Also Only A Theory That The World Goes Round The Sun - It's Just A Theory For Which There Is An Immense Amount Of Evidence. There Are Many Scientific Theories That Are In Doubt. Even Within Evolution, There Is Some Room For Controversy. But That We Are Cousins Of Apes And Jackals And Starfish, Let's Say, That Is A Fact In The Ordinary Sense Of The Word.

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

I Think We Certainly Benefit From Social Institutions Which Encourage Us Towards Moral Behavior. It's Very Important To Have Law. It's Very Important To Have A Moral Education.

This Person Should Have Been Aborted Years Ago.

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.

What Has 'theology' Ever Said That Is Of The Smallest Use To Anybody? When Has 'theology' Ever Said Anything That Is Demonstrably True And Is Not Obvious? What Makes You Think That 'theology' Is A Subject At All?

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.

The Idea That God Could Only Forgive Our Sins By Having His Son Tortured To Death As A Scapegoat Is Surely, From An Objective Point Of View, A Deeply Unpleasant Idea. If God Wanted To Forgive Us Our Sins, Why Didn't He Just Forgive Them? Why Did He Have To Have His Son Tortured?

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.

Ironically, I Originally Wrote The Tweet With Jews And Thought, That Might Give Offense. And So I Thought I Better Change It.

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

I Think That A New Kind Of Replicator Has Recently Emerged On This Very Planet. It Is Staring Us In The Face. It Is Still In Its Infancy, Still Drfiting Clumsily About In Its Primeval Soup, But Already It Is Achieving Evolutionary Change At A Rate Which Leaves The Old Gene Panting Far Behind.

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

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.

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.

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

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

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

Mass Destruction

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