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

-Richard Dawkins

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The Obvious Objections To

Richard Dawkins

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

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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.

My Point Is Not That Religion Itself Is The Motivation For Wars, Murders And Terrorist Attacks, But That Religion Is The Principal Label, And The Most Dangerous One, By Which A "they" As Opposed To A "we" Can Be Identified At All.

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.

Don't Ask God To Cure Cancer And World Poverty. He's Too Busy Finding You A Parking Space And Fixing The Weather For Your Barbecue.

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

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!

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

Science Has Eradicated Smallpox, Can Immunise Against Most Previously Deadly Viruses, Can Kill Most Previously Deadly Bacteria. Theology Has Done Nothing But Talk Of Pestilence As The Wages Of Sin.

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.

Suppose That There's A Gene That Makes You Gay If You Were Bottle-fed But That Has Some Completely Different Effect If You Were Breast-fed. So In The Days Before Bottles Were Invented That Gene Would Not Have Manifested Itself As Gay Behavior, But Now That Bottles Are Common It Can Do So.

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

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'.

Never Say, And Never Take Seriously Anyone Who Says, 'i Cannot Believe That So-and-so Could Have Evolved By Gradual Selection.' I Have Dubbed This Kind Of Fallacy 'the Argument From Personal Incredulity.' Time And Again, It Has Proven The Prelude To An Intellectual Banana-skin Experience.

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

I Think There In A Great Deal To Be Said For Religious Education In The Sense Of Teaching About Religion And Biblical Literacy. Both Those Things, By The Way, I Suspect Will Prepare A Child To Give Up Religion. If You Are Taught Comparative Religion, You Are More Likely To Realise That There Are Other Religions Than The One You Have Been Brought Up In. And If You Are If You Are Taught To Read The Bible, I Can Think Of Almost Nothing More Calculated To Turn You Off Religion.

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

If There Is A God

And The Beauty Of The Anthropic Principle Is That It Tells Us, Against All Intuition, That A Chemical Model Need Only Predict That Life Will Arise On One Planet In A Billion Billion To Give Us A Good And Entirely Satisfying Explanation For The Presence Of Life Here.

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

The Popularity Of The Paranormal, Oddly Enough, Might Even Be Grounds For Encouragement. I Think That The Appetite For Mystery, The Enthusiasm For That Which We Do Not Understand, Is Healthy And To Be Fostered. It Is The Same Appetite Which Drives The Best Of True Science, And It Is An Appetite Which True Science Is Best Qualified To Satisfy.

If 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Science Replaces Private Prejudice With Public, Verifiable Evidence.

I've Been Reading An Alabama Newspaper That One Man Shot Another Man Because He Beat Him In A Bible-quoting Competition.

Thus The Creationist's Favourite Question "what Is The Use Of Half An Eye?" Actually, This Is A Lightweight Question, A Doddle To Answer. Half An Eye Is Just 1 Per Cent Better Than 49 Per Cent Of An Eye.

The Idea Of An Afterlife Where You Can Be Reunited With Loved Ones Can Be Immensely Consoling - Though Not To Me.

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.

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

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

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'.

It Really Comes Down To Parsimony, Economy Of Explanation. It Is Possible That Your Car Engine Is Driven By Psychokinetic Energy, But If It Looks Like A Petrol Engine, Smells Like A Petrol Engine And Performs Exactly As Well As A Petrol Engine, The Sensible Working Hypothesis Is That It Is A Petrol Engine.

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).

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

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

Such Delusions Of Grandeur To Think That A God With A Hundred Billion Galaxies On His Mind Would Give A Tuppenny Damn Who You Sleep With, Or Indeed Whether You Believe In Him.

There Are All Sorts Of Things That Would Be Comforting. I Expect An Injection Of Morphine Would Be Comforting... But To Say That Something Is Comforting Is Not To Say That It's True.

If All The Evidence In The Universe Turned In Favour Of Creationism, I Would Be The First To Admit It, And I Would Immediately Change My Mind. As Things Stand, However, All Available Evidence (and There Is A Vast Amount Of It) Favours Evolution.

God Exists, If Only In The Form Of A Meme With High Survival Value, Or Infective Power, In The Environment Provided By Human Culture.

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.

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.

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?

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

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.

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.

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

I Hate The Neologism "owned" For "scored A Victory Over". I Have No Intention Of Owning Anyone, And Nobody Will Ever Own Me.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

Real Life Seeks The Gentle Slopes At The Back Of Mount Improbable, While Creationists Are Blind To All But The Daunting Precipice At The Front.

The Thing That Defines A Species Is That All Members Have The Same Addressing System For Their Dna.

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.

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

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

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

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

The Present Luddism Over Genetic Engineering May Die A Natural Death As The Computer-illiterate Generation Is Superseded.... I Fear That, If The Green Movement's High-amplitude Warnings Over Gmos Turn Out To Be Empty, People Will Be Dangerously Disinclined To Listen To Other And More Serious Warnings.

Time And Again, My Sociobiological Colleagues Have Upbraided Me As A Turncoat, Because I Will Not Agree With Them That The Ultimate Criterion For The Success Of A Meme Must Be Its Contribution To Darwinian "fitness". At Bottom, They Insist, A "good Meme" Spreads Because Brains Are Receptive To It, And The Receptiveness Of Brains Is Ultimately Shaped By (genetic) Natural Selection.

Nature Is Not Cruel, Only Pitilessly Indifferent. This Is One Of The Hardest Lessons For Humans To Learn. We Cannot Admit That Things Might Be Neither Good Nor Evil, Neither Cruel Nor Kind, But Simply Callous-indifferent To All Suffering, Lacking All Purpose.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Charles Darwin Made Arguably The Greatest Discovery Any Human Has Ever Made. He Was A Man Of Great Persistence. He Wasn't Probably A Natural Genius, He Worked Very Hard - Even Though He Was An Invalid. He Was A Great Family Man, A Very Nice Man. I Think He Was Admirable In All Sorts Of Ways.

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.

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.

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.

Creationists And Holocaust Deniers Are Both Very Similar - Both Are Denying What Is A Perfectly Manifest Fact. In The Case Of Holocaust Deniers It's More Recent History, But In Both Cases The Evidence - In Favour Of The Holocaust And Evolution - Is Simply Overwhelming. That Doesn't Mean They Are Morally Or Politically Equivalent. But They Are Equivalent In Denying History.

Bush And Bin Laden Are Really On The Same Side: The Side Of Faith And Violence Against The Side Of Reason And Discussion. Both Have Implacable Faith That They Are Right And The Other Is Evil. Each Believes That When He Dies He Is Going To Heaven. Each Believes That If He Could Kill The Other, His Path To Paradise In The Next World Would Be Even Swifter. The Delusional "next World" Is Welcome To Both Of Them. This World Would Be A Much Better Place Without Either Of Them.

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

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

What I Am Skeptical About Is The Idea That Whatever Wonderful Revelation Does Come In The Science Of The Future, It Will Turn Out To Be One Of The Particular Historical Religions That People Happen To Have Dreamed Up.

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

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.

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

It Is Time To Stop The Mealy-mouthed Euphemisms: 'nationalists', 'loyalists', 'communities', 'ethnic Groups', 'cultures', 'civilizations'. Religions Is The Word You Need. Religions Is The Word You Are Struggling Hypocritially To Avoid.

You Contain A Trillion Copies Of A Large, Textual Document Written In A Highly Accurate, Digital Code, Each Copy As Voluminous As A Substantial Book. I'm Talking, Of Course, Of The Dna In Your Cells.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

Faith Is Powerful Enough To Immunize People Against All Appeals To Pity, To Forgiveness, To Decent Human Feelings. It Even Immunizes Them Against Fear, If They Honestly Believe That A Martyr's Death Will Send Them Straight To Heaven.

We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

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.

When I Say That Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines, One Shouldn't Put Too Much Emphasis On The Word 'just.' There Is A Very Great Deal Of Complication, And Indeed Beauty In Being A Gene Machine.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

Why Do More Than 40 Percent Of Americans Think That The Universe Began After The Domestication Of The Dog?

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?

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 Animals Are The Most Complicated Things In The Known Universe.

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

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 Can Remember At The Age Of About Six Being Fascinated By The Planets And Learning All About Mars And Venus And Things.

Biology Is The Study Of Complicated Things That Give The Appearance Of Having Been Designed For A Purpose

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

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.

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.

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.

There Isn't [in New Atheism]. Nothing That Wasn't In Bertrand Russell Or Probably Robert Ingersoll. But I Suppose It Is More Of A Political Effect, In That All These Books Happened To Come Out At The Same Time. I Like To Think That We Have Some Influence.

I Think What Attracts Me About The Electric Monk Is That It's Such An Eloquent Example Of The Futility Of Belief For Belief's Sake. I Mean There's Only Any Point In Believing Something If It's True.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

With So Many Mind-bytes To Be Downloaded, So Many Mental Codons To Be Replicated, It Is No Wonder That Child Brains Are Gullible, Open To Almost Any Suggestion, Vulnerable To Subversion, Easy Prey To Moonies, Scientologists And Nuns. Like Immune-deficient Patients, Children Are Wide Open To Mental Infections That Adults Might Brush Off Without Effort.

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

There Does Seem To Be A Sense In Which Physics Has Gone Beyond What Human Intuition Can Understand. We Shouldn't Be Too Surprised About That Because We're Evolved To Understand Things That Move At A Medium Pace At A Medium Scale. We Can't Cope With The Very Tiny Scale Of Quantum Physics Or The Very Large Scale Of Relativity.

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.

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

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.

Yes, Testosterone-sodden Young Men Too Unattractive To Get A Woman In This World Might Be Desperate Enough To Go For 72 Private Virgins In The Next.

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

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

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

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

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

The Universe We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Blind, Pitiless Indifference.

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.

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

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.

I Mean It As A Compliment When I Say That You Could Almost Define A Philosopher As Someone Who Won't Take Common Sense For An Answer.

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

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

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.

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.

Over The Centuries, We've Moved On From Scripture To Accumulate Precepts Of Ethical, Legal And Moral Philosophy. We've Evolved A Liberal Consensus Of What We Regard As Underpinnings Of Decent Society, Such As The Idea That We Don't Approve Of Slavery Or Discrimination On The Grounds Of Race Or Sex, That We Respect Free Speech And The Rights Of The Individual. All Of These Things That Have Become Second Nature To Our Morals Today Owe Very Little To Religion, And Mostly Have Been Won In Opposition To The Teeth Of Religion.

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Meaning.

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

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.

Religion And Science Have Nothing To Do With Each Other, They're About Different Things, Science Is About The Way The World Works And Religion Is About [...] Miracles. [...] And In Any Case, If You Ask Most Ordinary People In Church Or In A Mosque Why They Believe, It's Almost Certainly Got Something To Do With The Belief That God Does Wonderful Things, That God Intervenes, That God Heals The Sick, That God Answers Prayers, God Forgives Sins.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

An Atheist Before Darwin Could Have Said, Following Hume: 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 Can't Help Feeling That Such A Position, Though Logically Sound, Would Have Left One Feeling Pretty Unsatisfied, And That Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

By Dislaiming The Idea Of A Next Life, We Can Take More Excitement In This One!

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

Religion Shows A Pattern Of Heredity Which I Think Is Similar To Genetic Heredity. ... There Are Hundreds Of Different Religious Sects, And Every Religious Person Is Loyal To Just One Of These. ... The Overwhelming Majority Just Happen To Choose The One Their Parents Belonged To. Not The Sect That Has The Best Evidence In Its Favour, The Best Miracles, The Best Moral Code, The Best Cathedral, The Best Stained-glass, The Best Music When It Comes To Choosing From The Smorgasbord Of Available Religions, Their Potential Virtues Seem To Count For Nothing Compared To The Matter Of Heredity.

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Thought Provoking

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.

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

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

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

I Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

It Is Important Not To Confuse Race And Religion.

Race And Religion

Evolution Has No Long-term Goal. There Is No Long-distance Target, No Final Perfection To Serve As A Criterion For Selection, Although Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

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

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

Heat Of The Sun

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

Science Coverage Could Be Improved By The Recognition That Science Is Timeless, And Therefore Science Stories Should Not Need To Be Pegged To An Item In The News.

The Time Has Come For People Of Reason To Say: Enough Is Enough! Religious Faith Discourages Independent Thought, It's Divisive And It's Dangerous.

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

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

It Is Possible To Enjoy The Mozart Concerto Without Being Able To Play The Clarinet. In Fact, You Can Learn To Be An Expert Connoisseur Of Music Without Being Able To Play A Note On Any Instrument. Of Course, Music Would Come To A Halt If Nobody Ever Learned To Play It. But If Everybody Grew Up Thinking That Music Was Synonymous With Playing It, Think How Relatively Impoverished Many Lives Would Be. Couldn't We Learn To Think Of Science In The Same Way?

I Do Like Philip Pullman.and That's An Exception Because Philip Pullman's Books Allow Magic.

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.

In Medieval Times, The Church Used To Sell 'indulgences' For Money. This Amounted To Paying For Some Number Of Days' Remission From Purgatory, And The Church Literally (and With Breathtaking Presumption) Issued Signed Certificates Specifying The Number Of Days Off That Had Been Purchased. . . . And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History. . . .

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

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

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.

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

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

Evolution Is Fundamentally Hostile To Religion.

The Distribution Of Species On Islands And Continents Throughout The World Is Exactly What You'd Expect If Evolution Was A Fact. The Distribution Of Fossils In Space And In Time Are Exactly What You Would Expect If Evolution Were A Fact. There Are Millions Of Facts All Pointing In The Same Direction And No Facts Pointing In The Wrong Direction.

If 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.

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

God Is An Idea That People Believe In And I Spend Time Arguing With People That Subscribe To That Idea(man Made Idea).

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

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.

Science Boosts Its Claim To Truth By Its Spectacular Ability To Make Matter And Energy Jump Through Hoops On Command, And To Predict What Will Happen And When.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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