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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.

-Richard Dawkins

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Scientists Can Have Their

Richard Dawkins

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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.

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

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

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

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There's No Point Of Having Faith If You Have Evidence.

Bereavement Is Terrible, Of Course. And When Somebody You Love Dies, It's A Time For Reflection, A Time For Memory, A Time For Regret.

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?

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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.

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Race And Religion

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

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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?

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Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

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Mad Cow Disease

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If There Is A God

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I'm Pretty Sure There Is Some Genetic Component Towards Intelligence.

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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.

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.

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.

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I Am One Of Those Scientists Who Feels That It Is No Longer Enough Just To Get On And Do Science. We Have To Devote A Significant Proportion Of Our Time And Resources To Defending It From Deliberate Attack From Organised Ignorance.

If The History-deniers Who Doubt The Fact Of Evolution Are Ignorant Of Biology, Those Who Think The World Began Less Than Ten Thousand Years Ago Are Worst Than Ignorant, They Are The Deluded To The Point Of Perversity.

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.

We Have This One Life, Let's Enjoy It, Let's Live It To The Full And Don't Get So Worked Up About Don't Identify Yourself So Passionately With This Business Called Religion.

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.

God Is The Answer To All Of Those "how Must It Have Come To Be" Questions.

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.

Evolution Is Not A Genetically Controlled Distortion Of One Adult Form Into Another; It Is A Genetically Controlled Alteration In A Developmental Program.

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.

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.

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

Let Us Understand Darwinism So We Can Walk In The Opposite Direction When It Comes To Setting Up Society.

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.

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

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

I Think What I'd Really Like To See Would Be A Mass Consciousness-raising Movement So That We Would All Become Vegetarian.

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

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 Essence Of Life Is Statistical Improbability On A Colossal Scale.

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.

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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.

You Can't Imagine How Gratifying It Is To Have A Reader Come Up To You And Say, 'you Changed My Life.'

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

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.

Science Shares With Religion The Claim That It Answers Deep Questions About Origins, The Nature Of Life, And The Cosmos. But There The Resemblance Ends. Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

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 Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

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The Universe Doesn't Owe You A Sense Of Hope

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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'.

I Don't Feel Depressed. I Feel Elated.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

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.

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.

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

The Other Way Is The Multiverse Way. That Says That Maybe The Universe We Are In Is One Of A Very Large Number Of Universes. The Vast Majority Will Not Contain Life Because They Have The Wrong Gravitational Constant Or The Wrong This Constant Or That Constant. But As The Number Of Universes Climbs, The Odds Mount That A Tiny Minority Of Universes Will Have The Right Fine-tuning.

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.

Something Pretty Mysterious Had To Give Rise To The Origin Of The Universe.

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

Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

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

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

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

Matthew And Luke Handle The Problem Differently, By Deciding That Jesus Must Have Been Born In Bethlehem After All. But They Get Him There By Different Routes.

It Could Be Any Of A Billion Gods. It Could Be God Of The Martians Or Of The Inhabitants Of Alpha Centauri. The Chance Of Its Being A Particular God, Yahweh, The God Of Jesus, Is Vanishingly Small - At The Least, The Onus Is On You To Demonstrate Why You Think That's The Case.

There Is Another Kind Of Altruism That Seems To Go Beyond That, A Kind Of Super-altruism, Which Humans Appear To Have. And I Think That Does Need A Darwinian Explanation.

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.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

Textbooks Describe Dna As A Blueprint For A Body. It's Better Seen As A Recipe For Making A Body, Because It Is Irreversible. But Today I Want To Present It As Something Different Again, And Even More Intriguing. The Dna In You Is A Coded Description Of Ancient Worlds In Which Your Ancestors Lived. Dna Is The Wisdom Out Of The Old Days, And I Mean Very Old Days Indeed.

I Am Agnostic Only To The Extent That I Am Agnostic About Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

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

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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

Purpose Of Life

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?

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

To Fill A World With ... Religions Of The Abrahamic Kind, Is Like Littering The Streets With Loaded Guns. Do Not Be Surprised If They Are Used.

Religious Organisations Have An Automatic Tax-free Charitable Status.

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."

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.

Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors Died Young. They All Copulated At Least Once.

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.

If You Look Up At The Milky Way Through The Eyes Of Carl Sagan, You Get A Feeling In Your Chest Of Something Greater Than Yourself. And It Is. But It's Not Supernatural.

I Am Passionate About Truth And Passionate About Clarity, And I Don't Regard Myself As Particularly Militant Or Aggressive. I Simply Wish To Discuss What Is True And To Listen To Evidence And Put Evidence Forward To Other People And Have A Sensible, Sane, Moderated Argument.

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

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.

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

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

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'.

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

But Perhaps The Rest Of Us Could Have Separate Classes In Science Appreciation, The Wonder Of Science, Scientific Ways Of Thinking, And The History Of Scientific Ideas, Rather Than Laboratory Experience.

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?

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

I 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.

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

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

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

There's A Natural Tendency For Children To, In Some Sense, Inherit The Cultural Values Of Their Parents. I'm Not Against That, That's Fine, That's Wonderful. What I Am Against Is Labelling. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Cricketer Because His Father Is A Cricketer, But They Do Label A Child A Catholic Because His Parents Are Catholic. I Think It's More Or Less Unique. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Socialist Or A Conservative Or A Liberal Because That's What Their Parents Are.

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.

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

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.

Maybe Scientists Are Fundamentalist When It Comes To Defining In Some Abstract Way What Is Meant By 'truth'. But So Is Everybody Else. I Am No More Fundamentalist When I Say Evolution Is True Than When I Say It Is True That New Zealand Is In The Southern Hemisphere. We Believe In Evolution Because The Evidence Supports It, And We Would Abandon It Overnight If New Evidence Arose To Disprove It.

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?

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.

My Mind Is Open To The Most Wonderful Range Of Future Possibilities, Which I Cannot Even Dream About.

There Is An Anaesthetic Of Familiarity, A Sedative Of Ordinariness Which Dulls The Senses And Hides The Wonder Of Existence. For Those Of Us Not Gifted In Poetry, It Is At Least Worth While From Time To Time Making An Effort To Shake Off The Anaesthetic. What Is The Best Way Of Countering The Sluggish Habitutation Brought About By Our Gradual Crawl From Babyhood? We Can't Actually Fly To Another Planet. But We Can Recapture That Sense Of Having Just Tumbled Out To Life On A New World By Looking At Our Own World In Unfamiliar Ways.

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.

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.

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.

God's Existence Is Either True Or Not. But Calling It A Scientific Question Implies That The Tools Of Science Can Provide The Answer.

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

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

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!

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.

I Am Not An Enthusiast For Diversity Of Opinion Where Facts Are Concerned.

Many Of Us Saw Religion As Harmless Nonsense. Beliefs Might Lack All Supporting Evidence But, We Thought, If People Needed A Crutch For Consolation, Where's The Harm? September 11th Changed All That.

If Any Remedy Is Tested Under Controlled Scientific Conditions And Proved To Be Effective, It Will Cease To Be Alternative And Will Simply Become Medicine. So-called Alternative Medicine Either Hasn't Been Tested Or It Has Failed Its Tests.

Saddam Hussein's Mind Would Have Been A Unique Resource For Historical, Political And Psychological Research: A Resource That Is Now Forever Unavailable To Scholars... In A Small Way His Execution Represents A Wanton And Vandalistic Destruction Of Important Research Data.

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

By Being Outside Of Nature, God Is Also Outside Of Space And Time.

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.

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.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

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.

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

Religious People Split Into Three Main Groups When Faced With Science. I Shall Label Them The "know-nothings", The "know-alls", And The "no-contests."

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.

I'm A Cultural Christian In The Same Way Many Of My Friends Call Themselves Cultural Jews Or Cultural Muslims.

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.

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

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.

No Educated Person Believes The Adam And Eve Myth Nowadays, But It's Surprising How Many Parents Think That It's Somehow Fun To Pass On This Falsehood To Their Children...i Would Want To Argue That The Truth Of Evolution Is More Interesting And More Poetic

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 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.

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

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.

So Occam's Razor - Occam Says You Should Choose The Explanation That Is Most Simple And Straightforward - Leads Me More To Believe In God Than In The Multiverse, Which Seems Quite A Stretch Of The Imagination.

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

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.

I Am Persuaded That 'child Abuse' Is No Exaggeration When Used To Describe What Teachers And Priests Are Doing To Children Whom They Encourage To Believe In Something Like...eternal Hell.

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.

The God Of The Old Testament Is Arguably The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction: Jealous And Proud Of It; A Petty, Unjust, Unforgiving Control-freak; A Vindictive, Bloodthirsty Ethnic Cleanser; A Misogynistic, Homophobic, Racist, Infanticidal, Genocidal, Filicidal, Pestilential, Megalomaniacal, Sadomasochistic, Capriciously Malevolent Bully.

My Thoughts, My Beliefs, My Feelings Are All In My Brain. My Brain Is Going To Rot.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

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

If We Want To Know Where The Truth Lies In Particular Cases, We Have To Look.

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.

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