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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.

-Richard Dawkins

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Thus The Creationist's Favourite

Richard Dawkins

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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.

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

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.

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

All Religious Beliefs Seem Weird To People Not Brought Up In Them.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

If You Don't Understand How Something Works, Never Mind: Just Give Up And Say God Did It. You Don't Know How The Nerve Impulse Works? Good! You Don't Understand How Memories Are Laid Down In The Brain? Excellent! Is Photosynthesis A Bafflingly Complex Process? Wonderful! Please Don't Go To Work On The Problem, Just Give Up, And Appeal To God.

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

The Beauty Of Evolution Is That It Does Provide An Explanation Of How You Can Get Complexity Out Of Simplicity. It Does It By Slow, Gradual Degree. At No Point Are You Postulating The Sudden Coming Into Existence Of A Complicated Being.

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

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

What Francis [collins] Was Just Saying About Genesis Was, Of Course, A Little Private Quarrel Between Him And His Fundamentalist Colleagues. It Would Be Unseemly For Me To Enter In Except To Suggest That He'd Save Himself An Awful Lot Of Trouble If He Just Simply Ceased To Give Them The Time Of Day.

Even If There Were No Actual Evidence In Favor Of The Darwinian Theory, We Should Still Be Justified In Preferring It Over All Rival Theories.

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.

Suffering Is A Byproduct Of Evolution By Natural Selection, An Inevitable Consequence That May Worry Us In Our More Sympathetic Moments But Cannot Be Expected To Worry A Tiger - Even If A Tiger Can Be Said To Worry About Anything At All - And Certainly Cannot Be Expected To Worry Its Genes.

We Don't Need Fossils - The Case For Evolution Is Watertight Without Them; So It Is Paradoxical To Use Gaps In The Fossil Record As Though They Were Evidence Against Evolution

The Idea Of Tiny Changes Cumulated Over Many Steps Is An Immensely Powerful Idea, Capable Of Explaining An Enormous Range Of Things That Would Be Otherwise Inexplicable.

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.

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

Creationists Are Possibly Gaining More Political Power. In The U.s., You Are Constantly Hearing Stories Of School Boards Harassing Teachers And Trying To Get Textbooks Banned.

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

Evolution Could So Easily Be Disproved If Just A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Date Order. Evolution Has Passed This Test With Flying Colours.

Of Course In Science There Are Things That Are Open To Doubt And Things Need To Be Discussed. But Among The Things That Science Does Know, Evolution Is About As Certain As Anything We Know.

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

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.

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.

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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

I Was Brought Up In A Family Which Valued Natural History. Both My Parents Knew The Names Of All The British Wildflowers, So As We Went Walking The Country, I Was Constantly Being Exposed To A Natural History Sort Of Knowledge.

False Beliefs Can Be Every Bit As Consoling As True Ones, Right Up Until The Moment Of Disillusionment.

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

Physicists Have Come Up With Other Explanations. One Is To Say That These Six Constants Are Not Free To Vary. Some Unified Theory Will Eventually Show That They Are As Locked In As The Circumference And The Diameter Of A Circle. That Reduces The Odds Of Them All Independently Just Happening To Fit The Bill.

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

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.

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 Cannot Prove That There Is No God, But We Can Safely Conclude The He Is Very, Very Improbable Indeed.

There Is No God

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

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

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

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.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

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

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

If Complex Organisms Demand An Explanation, So Does A Complex Designer. And It's No Solution To Raise The Theologian's Plea That God (or The Intelligent Designer) Is Simply Immune To The Normal Demands Of Scientific Explanation. To Do So Would Be To Shoot Yourself In The Foot. You Cannot Have It Both Ways. Either Id Belongs In The Science Classroom, In Which Case It Must Submit To The Discipline Required Of A Scientific Hypothesis. Or It Does Not, In Which Case, Get It Out Of The Science Classroom And Send It Back To Church, Where It Belongs.

Cloning May Be Good And It May Be Bad. Probably It's A Bit Of Both. The Question Must Not Be Greeted With Reflex Hysteria But Decided Quietly, Soberly And On Its Own Merits. We Need Less Emotion And More Thought.

There Is A Whole Field Of Inquiry That Has Come Up In The Last 30 Or 40 Years - Some Call It Sociobiology Or Evolutionary Psychology - Relating To Where We Get Our Moral Sense And Why We Value The Idea Of Altruism, And Locating Both Answers In Behavioral Adaptations For The Preservation Of Our Genes.

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

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

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.

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.

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

More Poignant For Us, At Laetoli In Tanzania Are The Companionable Footprints Of Three Real Hominids, Probably Australopithecus Afarensis, Walking Together 3.6 Million Years Ago In What Was Then Fresh Volcanic Ash. Who Does Not Wonder What These Individuals Were To Each Other, Whether They Held Hands Or Even Talked, And What Forgotten Errand They Shared In A Pliocene Dawn?

Some Sort Of Belief In All-powerful Supernatural Beings Is Common, If Not Universal. A Tendency To Obey Authority, Perhaps Especially In Children, A Tendency To Believe What You're Told, A Tendency To Fear Your Own Death, A Tendency To Wish To See Your Loved Ones Who Have Died, To Wish To See Them Again, A Wish To Understand Where You Came From, Where The World Came From, All These Psychological Predispositions, Under The Right Cultural Conditions, Tend To Lead To People Believing In Things For Which There Is No Evidence.

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.

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

The Human Psyche Has Two Great Sicknesses: The Urge To Carry Vendetta Across Generations, And The Tendency To Fasten Group Labels On People Rather Than See Them As Individuals. Abrahamic Religion Gives Strong Sanction To Both-and Mixes Explosively With Both. Only The Willfully Blind Could Fail To Implicate The Divisive Force Of Religion In Most, If Not All, Of The Violent Enmities In The World Today.

My Interest In Biology Was Pretty Much Always On The Philosophical Side.

I'm Fond Of Science Fiction. But Not All Science Fiction. I Like Science Fiction Where There's A Scientific Lesson, For Example - When The Science Fiction Book Changes One Thing But Leaves The Rest Of Science Intact And Explores The Consequences Of That. That's Actually Very Valuable.

I'm Not So Fond Of The Sort Of Science Fiction That Isn't Really Science Fiction But Is Sometimes Thought To Be - Gothic Princesses And White Horses And Bats And Castles And Things.

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Potential People Who Could Have Been Here In My Place But Who Will In Fact Never See The Light Of Day Outnumber The Sand Grains Of Sahara.

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

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

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.

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.

The Replicators That Exist Tend To Be The Ones That Are Good At Manipulating The World To Their Own Advantage. But Other Replicators Are Also Successful Otherwise They Would Not Be Common. The World Therefore Tends To Become Populated By Mutually Compatible Sets Of Successful Replicators, Replicators That Get On Well Together

I Once Wrote That Anybody Who Believes The World Is Only 6,000 Years Old Is Either Ignorant, Stupid, Insane Or Wicked.

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.

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.

So It Is Best To Keep An Open Mind And Be Agnostic. At First Sight That Seems An Unassailable Position, At Least In The Weak Sense Of Pascal's Wager. But On Second Thoughts It Seems A Cop-out, Because The Same Could Be Said Of Father Christmas And Tooth Fairies. There May Be Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden. There Is No Evidence For It, But You Can't Prove That There Aren't Any, So Shouldn't We Be Agnostic With Respect To Fairies?

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.

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.

Isn't It Sad To Go To Your Grave Without Ever Wondering Why You Were Born? Who, With Such A Thought, Would Not Spring From Bed, Eager To Resume Discovering The World And Rejoicing To Be Part Of It?

Five Per Cent Vision Is Better Than No Vision At All. Five Per Cent Hearing Is Better Than No Hearing At All. Five Per Cent Flight Efficiency Is Better Than No Flight At All. It Is Thoroughly Believable That Every Organ Or Apparatus That We Actually See Is The Product Of A Smooth Trajectory Through Animal Space, A Trajectory In Which Every Intermediate Stage Assisted Survival And Reproduction.

Our Subjective Judgment Of What Seems Like A Good Bet Is Irrelevant To What Is Actually A Good Bet.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Have They Discovered Evolution Yet?

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.

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.

We Are A Very, Very Unusual Species.

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

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

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.

Nowadays Theologians Aren't Quite So Straightforward As Paley. They Don't Point To Complex Living Mechanisms And Say That They Are Self-evidently Designed By A Creator, Just Like A Watch. But There Is A Tendency To Point To Them And Say 'it Is Impossible To Believe' That Such Complexity, Or Such Perfection, Could Have Evolved By Natural Selection. Whenever I Read Such A Remark, I Always Feel Like Writing 'speak For Yourself' In The Margin.

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

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.

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

Today The Theory Of Evolution Is About As Much Open To Doubt As The Theory That The Earth Goes Round The Sun.

Theory Of Evolution

[the Internet] Is By Far The Most Important Innovation In The Media In My Lifetime. It's Like Having A Huge Encyclopedia Permanently Available. There's A Tremendous Amount Of Rubbish On The World Wide Web, But Retrieval Of What You Want To So Rapid That It Doesn't Really Matter

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

There's Nothing Nonsensical About Saying That What Would Evolve If Darwinian Selection Has Its Head Is Something That You Don't Want To Happen. And I Could Easily Imagine Trying To Go Against Darwinism.

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

It Often Turns Out On Closer Inspection That Acts Of Apparent Altruism Are Really Selfishness In Disguise.

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

Theology Is A Non-subject. I'm Not Saying That Professors Of Theology Are Non-professors. They Do Interesting Things, Like Study Biblical History, Biblical Literature. But Theology, The Study Of Gods, The Study Of What Gods Do, Presupposes That Gods Exist. The Only Kind Of Theology That I Take Account Of Are Those Theological Arguments That Actually Argue For The Existence Of God.

Religious Organisations Have An Automatic Tax-free Charitable Status.

For Me, Moral Questions Such As Stem-cell Research Turn Upon Whether Suffering Is Caused. In This Case, Clearly None Is. The Embryos Have No Nervous System. But That's Not An Issue Discussed Publicly. The Issue Is, Are They Human? If You Are An Absolutist Moralist, You Say, "these Cells Are Human, And Therefore They Deserve Some Kind Of Special Moral Treatment."

Those Who Wish To Base Their Morality Literally On The Bible Have Either Not Read It Or Not Understood It.

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

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

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.

But, However Many Ways There May Be Of Being Alive, It Is Certain That There Are Vastly More Ways Of Being Dead, Or Rather Not Alive.

It Is Important Not To Confuse Race And Religion.

Race And Religion

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.

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?

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

Why Would Anybody Be Intimidated By Mere Words? I Mean, Neither I Nor Any Other Athiest That I Know Ever Threatens Violence. We Never Threaten To Fly Planes Into Skyscrapers. We Never Threaten Suicide Bombs. We Are Very Gentle People. All We Do Is Use Words To Talk About Things Like The Cosmos, The Origin Of The Universe, Evolution, The Origin Of Life. What's There To Be Frightened Of? It's Just An Opinion.

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.

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

[richard Leakey Is] A Robust Hero Of A Man, Who Actually Lives Up To The Cliché, “a Big Man In Every Sense Of The Word.” Like Other Big Men He Is Loved By Many, Feared By Some, And Not Over-preoccupied With The Judgments Of Any.

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 Story Of Doubting Thomas Is Told, Not So That We Shall Admire Thomas, But So That We Can Admire The Other Apostles In Comparison. Thomas Demanded Evidence … The Other Apostles, Whose Faith Was So Strong That They Did Not Need Evidence, Are Held To Us As Worthy Of Imitation.

We Have Seen That Living Things Are Too Improbable And Too Beautifully 'designed' To Have Come Into Existence By Chance.

I Am Not Absolutely Positive There Is No God. Only In The Sense That I'm Not Absolutely Positive There Is No Large China Teapot In Orbit In The Solar System.

That There Is A Continuous Link From Humans To Gorillas, With The Intermediate Species Merely Long Dead, Is Beyond The Understanding Of Speciesists. Tie The Label Homo Sapiens Even To A Tiny Piece Of Insensible Embryonic Tissue, And Its Life Suddenly Leaps To Infinite, Incomputable Value.... Self-styled Pro-lifers, And Others That Indulge In Footling Debates About Exactly When In Its Development A Foetus Becomes Human, Exhibit The Same Discontinuous Mentality. Human, To The Discontinuous Mind, Is An Absolutist Concept. There Can Be No Half Measures. And From This Flows Much Evil.

If Ever There Was A Slamming Of The Door In The Face Of Constructive Investigation, It Is The Word Miracle. To A Medieval Peasant, A Radio Would Have Seemed Like A Miracle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

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

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.

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.

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.

Evolution Is A Very, Very Important Idea. It Is The Explanation For All Of Life - A Stunningly Simple, Yet Powerful Explanation. If You Think About It, Before Darwin, We Hadn't The Foggiest Idea Of How We Came Into Being. Now We Do. It's Still Such An Exciting Idea That It Is Well Worth Everybody Understanding It.

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

Granted, We May Try To Help Our Own Family Members Because They Share Our Dna. Or Help Someone Else In Expectation That They Will Help Us Later. But When You Look At What We Admire As The Most Generous Manifestations Of Altruism, They Are Not Based On Kin Selection Or Reciprocity. An Extreme Example Might Be Oskar Schindler Risking His Life To Save More Than A Thousand Jews From The Gas Chambers. That's The Opposite Of Saving His Genes.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

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.

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.

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

Superficially It's A Problem If Homosexuality Is Genetic - If The Difference Between People's Sexual Preferences Is Genetic - Because At Least A Pure Homosexual Would Be Unlikely To Reproduce And Therefore Pass On The Genes. So The First Question You Ask Is, Is It Actually Genetic, And The Answer Is Probably To Some Extent Yes.

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.

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

Heat Of The Sun

No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth.

I Think From My Point Of View - I Won't Say It Doesn't Matter Whether [darwinian Explanations] Are Right Or Wrong, It's Just Sufficient In Some Cases, For Me, To Be Able To Say, Well, At Least It's Not Totally Implausible From A Darwinian Point Of View.

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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. . . .

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die, Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Number Of People Who Could Be Here, In My Place, Out Number The Sand Grains In The Sahara. If You Think About All The Different Ways In Which Our Genes Could Be Permuted, You And I Are Quite Grotesquely Lucky To Be Here. The Number Of Events That Had To Happen In Order For You To Exist, In Order For Me To Exist... We Are Privileged To Be Alive And Nd We Should Make The Most Of Our Time On This World.

Can Omniscient God, Who Knows The Future, Find The Omnipotence To Change His Future Mind?

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.

I Speak As A Private Citizen And Not As A Representative Of The Executive Branch Of The United States Government. The Impression That People Of Faith Are Uniformly Opposed To Stem-cell Research Is Not Documented By Surveys. In Fact, Many People Of Strong Religious Conviction Think This Can Be A Morally Supportable Approach.

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

Gould Carried The Art Of Bending Over Backward To Positively Supine Lengths. Why Shouldn't We Comment On God, As Scientists? ... A Universe With A Creative Superintendent Would Be A Very Different Kind Of Universe From One Without. Why Is That Not A Scientific Matter?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

We Humans Are An Extremely Important Manifestation Of The Replication Bomb, Because It Is Through Us - Through Our Brains, Our Symbolic Culture And Our Technology - That The Explosion May Proceed To The Next Stage And Reverberate Through Deep Space.

Any Altruistic System Is Inherently Unstable, Because It Is Open To Abuse By Selfish Individuals, Ready To Exploit It.

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

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.

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?

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.

But What, After All, Is Faith? It Is A State Of Mind That Leads People To Believe Something - It Doesn't Matter What - In The Total Absence Of Supporting Evidence. If There Were Good Supporting Evidence Then Faith Would Be Superfluous, For The Evidence Would Compel Us To Believe It Anyway. It Is This That Makes The Often-parroted Claim That 'evolution Itself Is A Matter Of Faith' So Silly. People Believe In Evolution Not Because They Arbitrarily Want To Believe It But Because Of Overwhelming, Publicly Available Evidence.

In A Way, I Think Religion Is To Be Admired For Asking The Right Questions. I Just Think It's Got The Wrong Answers.

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

Why Did God Make Tigers So Good At Catching Prey, And At The Same Time Make Prey So Good At Getting Away From Tigers? You'd Think That If God Wanted One Thing Or The Other To Happen He'd Have Engineered It Rather Better. Maybe He Enjoyed The Spectator Sport?

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

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.

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

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If There Is Something That Appears To Lie Beyond The Natural World As It Is Now Imperfectly Understood, We Hope To Eventually Understand It And Embrace It Within The Natural. As Ever When We Unweave A Rainbow, It Will Not Become Less Wonderful.

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

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?

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.

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

Theologians Will Protest That The Story Of Abraham Sacrificing Issac Should Not Be Taken As Literal Fact. And The Appropriate Response Is Twofold: First, Many, Many People Even To This Day, Do Take The Whole Of Their Scripture To Be Literal Fact, And They Have A Great Deal Of Political Power Over The Rest Of Us, Especially In The United States And In The Islamic World. Second, If Not Of Literal Fact, How Should We Take The Story? As An Alagory? Then An Alagory For What? Surely, Nothing Praiseworthy. As A Moral Lesson? But What Kind Of Morals Could One Derive From This Appalling Story?

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

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

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.

Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born

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

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.

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.

We're Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones.

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.

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