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

-Richard Dawkins

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St. Augustine Wrote That

Richard Dawkins

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

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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.

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

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

They Are Either People Of Faith Who Have Lost Their Faith From Reading My Books, Or They Are People Who Had Already Lost Their Faith, And Something About My Books Encouraged Them To Affirm That.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There Are Sincere Believers Who Interpret Genesis 1 And 2 In A Very Literal Way That Is Inconsistent, Frankly, With Our Knowledge Of The Universe's Age Or Of How Living Organisms Are Related To Each Other.

If It Suits [god] To Be A Deity That We Must Seek Without Being Forced To, Would It Not Have Been Sensible For Him To Use The Mechanism Of Evolution Without Posting Obvious Road Signs To Reveal His Role In Creation?

I Believe That An Orderly Universe, One Indifferent To Human Preoccupations, In Which Everything Has An Explanation Even If We Still Have A Long Way To Go Before We Find It, Is A More Beautiful, More Wonderful Place Than A Universe Tricked Out With Capricious Ad Hoc Magic.

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

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

[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.

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.

I Do Object To The Assumption That Anything That Might Be Outside Of Nature Is Ruled Out Of The Conversation. That's An Impoverished View Of The Kinds Of Questions We Humans Can Ask, Such As "why Am I Here?", "what Happens After We Die?", "is There A God?" If You Refuse To Acknowledge Their Appropriateness, You End Up With A Zero Probability Of God After Examining The Natural World Because It Doesn't Convince You On A Proof Basis.

Design Can Never Be An Ultimate Explanation For Anything. It Can Only Be A Proximate Explanation. A Plane Or A Car Is Explained By A Designer But That's Because The Designer Himself, The Engineer, Is Explained By Natural Selection.

There Are Very Interesting Controversies Within Evolution; However, Whether Evolution Occurs Is Not One Of Them. It Definitely Does.

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

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.

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

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

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

Faith Is One Of The World's Great Evils, Comparable To The Smallpox Virus But Harder To Eradicate.

Mad Cow Disease

Offense Is What People Take When They Can't Take Argument.

Very Close Cousins Like Humans And Chimps Have Almost All Their Genes In Common. Slightly Less Close Cousins Like Humans And Monkeys Still Have Recognizably The Same Genes. You Could Carry On Right On Down To Humans And Bacteria, And You Will Find Continuous Compelling Evidence For The Hierarchical Tree Of Cousinship.

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

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

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.

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

If God Wanted To Forgive Our Sins, Why Not Just Forgive Them, Without Having Himself Tortured And Executed In Payment-thereby, Incidentally, Condemning Remote Future Generations Of Jews To Pogroms And Persecution As 'christ-killers': Did That Hereditary Sin Pass Down In The Semen Too?

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

If You're An Atheist, You Know, You Believe, This Is The Only Life You're Going To Get. It's A Precious Life. It's A Beautiful Life. Its Something We Should Live To The Full, To The End Of Our Days. Where If You're Religious And You Believe In Another Life Somehow, That Means You Don't Live This Life To The Full Because You Think You're Going To Get Another One. That's An Awfully Negative Way To Live A Life. Being A Atheist Frees You Up To Live This Life Properly, Happily And Fully

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

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

Race Does Not Come Into It. It Is Pure Religion And Culture. Something About The Cultural Tradition Of Jews Is Way, Way More Sympathetic To Science And Learning And Intellectual Pursuits Than Islam. That Would Have Been A Fair Comparison.

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

It's Very Important To Try To Inculcate Into Children Moral Rules, Such As "do As You Would Be Done By."

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

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.

There Is Something Wrong With Using Faith - Belief Without Evidence - As A Political Weapon. I Wouldn't Say There Is Something Similar About Using Science. Science - Or The Products Of Science Like Technology - Is Just A Way Of Achieving Something Real, Something That Happens, Something That Works.

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

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

It Would Be Intolerant If I Advocated The Banning Of Religion, But Of Course I Never Have.

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 I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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

A Delusion That Encourages Belief Where There Is No Evidence Is Asking For Trouble. Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle. Instead, Disagreements Are Settled By Other Means Which, In Extreme Cases, Inevitably Become Violent. 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.

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.

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

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.

The Universe Doesn't Owe Us Condolence Or Consolation; It Doesn't Owe Us A Nice Warm Feeling Inside.

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

I Became A Little Alarmed At The Number Of My Readers Who Took The Meme More Positively As A Theory Of Human Culture In Its Own Right - Either To Criticize It (unfairly, Given My Original Modest Intention) Or To Carry It Far Beyond The Limits Of What I Then Thought Justified. This Was Why I May Have Seemed To Backtrack.

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

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

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

Let's Get Up Off Our Knees, Stop Cringing Before Bogeymen And Virtual Fathers, Face Reality, And Help Science To Do Something Constructive About Human Suffering.

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

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.

I Think The Important Thing To Learn Is That We Can Retain A Sentimental Loyalty To The Cultural And Literary Traditions Of, Say, Judaism, Anglicanism Or Islam, And Even Participate In Religious Rituals Such As Marriages And Funerals, Without Buying Into The Supernatural Beliefs That Historically Went Along With Those Traditions. We Can Give Up Belief In God While Not Losing Touch With A Treasured Heritage.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

As Long As We Accept The Principle That Religious Faith Must Be Respected Simply Because It Is Religious Faith, It Is Hard To Withhold Respect From The Faith Of Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers

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

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

Dangerous Ideas

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

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.

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!

Religious Organisations Have An Automatic Tax-free Charitable Status.

Many People Want To Send Their Children To Faith Schools Because They Get Good Exam Results, But They're Not Foolish Enough To Believe That It's Because Of Faith That They Get Good Exam Results.

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

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.

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.

I Think We Have Got To Start Again And Go Right Back To First Principles. The Argument I Shall Advance, Surprising As It May Seem Coming From The Author Of The Earlier Chapters, Is That, For An Understanding Of The Evolution Of Modern Man, We Must Begin By Throwing Out The Gene As The Sole Basis Of Our Ideas On Evolution. If There Is Only One Creator Who Made The Tiger And The Lamb, The Cheetah And The Gazelle, What Is He Playing At? Is He A Sadist Who Enjoys Spectator Blood Sports? ... Is He Manuvering To Maximize David Attenborough's Television Ratings?

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Alister Mcgrath Has Now Written Two Books With My Name In The Title. The Poet W. B. Yeats, When Asked To Say Something About Bad Poets Who Made A Living By Parasitizing Him, Wrote The Splendid Line, 'was There Ever Dog That Praised His Fleas?

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.

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

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

The Deceitful Misquoting Of Scientists To Suit An Anti-scientific Agenda Ranks Among The Many Unchristian Habits Of Fundamentalist Authors.

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.

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.

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

People Will Listen To Sophisticated Physicists, Using God As A Kind Of Metaphor For The Deep Constants, The Deep Problems, The Deep Principles Of Physics, And Say That In That Sense I Believe In God. The Reaction Is, "oh, This Great Physicist Believes In God - That Means I'm Free To Believe In The Trinity And In The Crucifixion And In The Reincarnation Of Christ" - And All That Stuff, Which Of Course Has Nothing Whatever To Do With The Fundamental Constants Of Physics, Which Is What These Physicists Are Talking About.

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

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.

The Essence Of Life Is Statistical Improbability On A Colossal Scale.

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

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."

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.

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

There Is No Reason To Regard God As Immune From Consideration Along The Spectrum Of Probabilities. And There Is Certainly No Reason To Suppose That, Just Because God Can Be Neither Proved Nor Disproved, His Probability Of Existence Is 50 Per Cent.

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

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.

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 Take-home Message Is That We Should Blame Religion Itself, Not Religious Extremism - As Though That Were Some Kind Of Terrible Perversion Of Real, Decent Religion. Voltaire Got It Right Long Ago: 'those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.' So Did Bertrand Russell: 'many People Would Sooner Die Than Think. In Fact They Do.

The Feeling Of Awed Wonder That Science Can Give Us Is One Of The Highest Experiences Of Which The Human Psyche Is Capable. It Is A Deep Aesthetic Passion To Rank With The Finest That Music And Poetry Can Deliver. It Is Truly One Of The Things That Make Life Worth Living And It Does So, If Anything, More Effectively If It Convinces Us That The Time We Have For Living Is Quite Finite.

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

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.

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.

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

If We Ever Talk To Aliens, Their Civilisation Will Be Far More Advanced Than Ours (because Of Distances Involved). They Won't Be Religious!

I Read Novels For Entertainment Rather Than For Edification, So I Tend Not To Read The Sort Of Novels That Are Said To Illuminate The Human Condition.

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

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.

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

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority. But A Good First Step Would Be To Build Up A Critical Mass Of Those Willing To 'come Out,' Thereby Encouraging Others To Do So. Even If They Can't Be Herded, Cats In Sufficient Numbers Can Make A Lot Of Noise And They Cannot Be Ignored.

It's An Important Point To Realize That The Genetic Programming Of Our Lives Is Not Fully Deterministic. It Is Statistical - It Is In Any Animal Merely Statistical - Not Deterministic.

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.

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.

It Would Be Really Worrying If, As A Darwinian, It Was Impossible To Think Of Ways In Which Our Behavior Could Be Explained.

...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.

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.

Pantheism Is Sexed-up Atheism. Deism Is Watered-down Theism.

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

I Think The Written Word Is Probably The Best Medium Of Communication Because You Have Time To Reflect, You Have Time To Choose Your Words, To Get Your Sentences Exactly Right. Whereas When You're Being Interviewed, Say, You Have To Talk On The Fly, You Have To Improvise, You Can Change Sentences Around, And They're Not Exactly Right.

I've Seen [lalla Ward] Episodes Of "doctor Who." They're Good, At Least Partly Because The Scripts Were Written By Douglas Adams.

One Of The Possible Reasons Why We Might Be Good Is That We're Frightened, Frightened Of God. We Want The Reward In Heaven, We Don't Want To Go To Hell. That Would Be An Ignoble, Ignominious Reason For Being Good, And I Think That If Anybody Was Good To You Just Because They Hoped For A Heavenly Reward, You Wouldn't Respect Them, You'd Probably Give Them A Wide Berth.

I Might Respect You As A Brilliant Intellect, Runner, Musician Or Juggler. But Respect Your Beliefs? Only If They're Supported By Evidence.

I Get The Feeling More And More That Religion Is Being Left Behind.

I'm Quite A Softy, Yes. I Have A Blank Spot With Respect To Visual Art, But I Have Perhaps A Compensating Hypersensitivity To Poetry And Music.

Poetry And Music

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 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

It Has Been Convincingly Demonstrated That Countries Where There Are High Rates Of Poverty, Or High Rates Of Economic Inequality, Are The Countries With The Highest Rates Of Religious Beliefs.

Economic Inequality

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

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.

Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's Science Hero, Was A Sort Of Irascible Man Constantly Bellowing At People, So He Was A Little Bit Of A Departure From Both Of Those Stereotypes.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Why Would An All-powerful Creator Decide To Plant His Carefully Crafted Species On Islands And Continents In Exactly The Appropriate Pattern To Suggest, Irresistibly, That They Had Evolved And Dispersed From The Site Of Their Evolution?

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

Religion Is Not The Root Of All Evil, For No One Thing Is The Root Of All Anything.

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

There Is Economics In Biology, Nothing Is Free, Everything Has To Be Paid For, There Are Costs As Well As Benefits To Everything In Life, For Example, There Was Never Sufficient Natural Selection Pressure To Develop Better Eyes, Individuals Could Earn Other Things Like Smiley Smiles Rather Than Waste Energy & Time On Better Eyes.

Dna Is Rom. It Can Be Read Millions Of Times Over, But Only Written To Once - When It Is First Assembled The Birth Of The Cell In Which It Resides.

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

The Idea Of A Divine Creator Belittles The Elegant Reality Of The Universe.

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.

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.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem. We Are Trying To Understand How We Have Got A Complicated World, And We Have An Explanation In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World, And We Explain That In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World And It All Hangs Together Down To An Ultimately Simple World. Now, God Is Not An Explanation Of That Kind. God Himself Cannot Be Simple If He Has Power To Do All The Things He Is Supposed To Do.

Complicated World

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.

People Sometimes Say That You Must Believe In Feelings Deep Inside, Otherwise You'd Never Be Confident Of Things Like 'my Wife Loves Me'. But This Is A Bad Argument. There Can Be Plenty Of Evidence That Somebody Loves You. All Through The Day When You Are With Somebody Who Loves You, You See And Hear Lots Of Little Tidbits Of Evidence, And They All Add Up. It Isn't Purely Inside Feeling, Like The Feeling That Priests Call Revelation. There Are Outside Things To Back Up The Inside Feeling: Looks In The Eye, Tender Notes In The Voice, Little Favors And Kindnesses; This Is All Real Evidence.

The Chances Of Each Of Us Coming Into Existence Are Infinitesimally Small, And Even Though We Shall All Die Some Day, We Should Count Ourselves Fantastically Lucky To Get Our Decades In The Sun.

It Could Be That At Some Earlier Time, Somewhere In The Universe, A Civilization Evolved By Probably Some Kind Of Darwinian Means To A Very, Very High Level Of Technology- And Designed A Form Of Life That They Seeded Onto Perhaps This Planet. And I Suppose It's Possible That You Might Find Evidence For That If You Look At The Details Of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, You Might Find A Signature Of Some Sort Of Designer.

We Have The Power To Defy The Selfish Genes Of Our Birth And, If Necessary, The Selfish Memes Of Our Indoctrination. We Can Even Discuss Ways Of Deliberately Cultivating And Nurturing Pure, Disinterested Altruism - Something That Has No Place In Nature, Something That Has Never Existed Before In The Whole History Of The World. 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.

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

I Could Easily Believe That Religion Could Enhance Health And Hence Survival, And That Therefore There Could Be Indeed Be Literally Darwinian Survival Value, Darwinian Selection In Favor Of Religion. None Of That Of Course Bears At All Upon The Truth Value Of The Claims Made By Religions.

Science Tells Us What We Have Reason To Believe. Not What We Have A Duty To Believe. Not What Experts, In Their Pontificating Wisdom, Instruct Us To Believe... No, Science Tells Us What There Is Good Reason To Believe.

You Can't Blame Science For Being Used For Evil Purposes. What You Can Do Is Say, 'this Is An Exceedingly Powerful Tool.' And You Want To Make Sure It Is Used For Good Purposes, Not Bad Ones. That Is A Political Decision.

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

Evolution Is As Much A Fact As The Heat Of The Sun.

Heat Of The Sun

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

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

Barring A Theoretical Resolution, Which I Think Is Unlikely, You Either Have To Say There Are Zillions Of Parallel Universes Out There That We Can't Observe At Present Or You Have To Say There Was A Plan. I Actually Find The Argument Of The Existence Of A God Who Did The Planning More Compelling Than The Bubbling Of All These Multiverses.

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

Our Brains Are Separate And Independent Enough From Our Genes To Rebel Against Them.. We Do So In A Small Way Everytime We Use Contraception. There Is No Reason Why We Should Not Rebel In A Large Way Too.

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 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.

Bad Things, Like Good Things Don't Happen Any More Often Than They Ought To By Chance. The Universe Has No Mind, No Feelings, And No Personality, So It Doesn't Do Things In Order To Either Hurt Or Please You. Bad Things Happen Because Things Happen.

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.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

Sometimes I Think It's Possible To Mistake Desire For Clarity And Talking In A No-nonsense Way For Aggression.

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

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

Without Gradualness...we Are Back To A Miracle.

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.

Anybody Who Objects To Cloning On Principle Has To Answer To All The Identical Twins In The World Who Might Be Insulted By The Thought That There Is Something Offensive About Their Very Existence. Clones Are Simply Identical Twins.

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

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.

For The First Half Of Geological Time Our Ancestors Were Bacteria. Most Creatures Still Are Bacteria, And Each One Of Our Trillions Of Cells Is A Colony Of Bacteria.

Natural Selection Is All About The Differential Success Of Rival Dna In Getting Itself Transmitted Vertically In The Species Archives.

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.

I Read In The Paper Today The List Of The Most Popular Boys' Names In Britain. The First Was Jack, The Second Was Mohammed. That Makes Me Feel A Little Bit Worried.

I Do Disapprove Very Strongly Of Labelling Children, Especially Young Children, As Something Like 'catholic Children' Or 'protestant Children' Or 'islamic Children.'

However Brief Our Time In The Sun, If We Waste A Second Of It, Or Complain That It Is Dull Or Barren Or (like A Child) Boring, Couldn't This Be Seen As A Callous Insult To Those Unborn Trillions Who Will Never Even Be Offered Life In The First Place?

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.

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

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