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Whether We Ever Get To Know About Them Or Not, There Are Very Probably Alien Civilizations That Are Superhuman, To The Point Of Being God-like In Ways That Exceed Anything A Theologian Could Possibly Imagine. Their Technical Achievements Would Seem As Supernatural To Us As Ours Would Seem To A Dark Age Peasant Transported To The Twenty-first Century. Imagine His Response To A Laptop Computer, A Mobile Telephone, A Hydrogen Bomb Or A Jumbo Jet.

-Richard Dawkins

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Whether We Ever Get

Richard Dawkins

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Whether We Ever Get To Know About Them Or Not, There Are Very Probably Alien Civilizations That Are Superhuman, To The Point Of Being God-like In Ways That Exceed Anything A Theologian Could Possibly Imagine. Their Technical Achievements Would Seem As Supernatural To Us As Ours Would Seem To A Dark Age Peasant Transported To The Twenty-first Century. Imagine His Response To A Laptop Computer, A Mobile Telephone, A Hydrogen Bomb Or A Jumbo Jet.

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

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

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.

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?

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

The Illusion Of Design Is So Successful That To This Day Most Americans (including, Significantly, Many Influential And Rich Americans) Stubbornly Refuse To Believe It Is An Illusion.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

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.

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

It Can Be Consoling To Think Your Children Are In Heaven. You Have Got To Understand That That Doesn't Make It True. Many People Cannot Understand That Distinction.

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.

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.

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'.

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

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.

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

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.

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.

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.

Next Time That Somebody Tells You Something Is True, Why Not Say To Them: 'what Kind Of Evidence Is There For That?' And If They Can't Give You A Good Answer, I Hope You'll Think Very Carefully Before You Believe A Word They Say.

The Resemblance Of The Signs Of The Zodiac To The Animals After Which They Are Named... Is As Unimpressive As The Predictions Of Astrologers.

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

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

The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle.

Are Science And Religion Converging? No. There Are Modern Scientists Whose Words Sound Religious But Whose Beliefs, On Close Examination, Turn Out To Be Identical To Those Of Other Scientists Who Straightforwardly Call Themselves Atheists.

I Think We Don't Do A Service To Dialogue Between Science And Faith To Characterize Sincere People By Calling Them Names. That Inspires An Even More Dug-in Position.

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

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

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

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?

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?

Religion Is Nothing More Than A Useless And Sometimes Dangerous, Evolutionary Accident. Religious Behavior May Be A Misfiring, An Unfortunate Byproduct Of An Underlying Psychological Propensity Which In Other Circumstances Is, Or Once Was, Useful.

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

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

Discrimination Is Not Liberal. Arguing Against Discrimination Is Not Intolerance.

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.

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

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.

We Should Take Astrology Seriously. No, I Don't Mean We Should Believe In It. I Am Talking About Fighting It Seriously Instead Of Humouring It As A Piece Of Harmless Fun.

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

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'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.

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.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

Religion Teaches You To Be Satisfied With Nonanswers. It’s A Sort Of Crime Against Childhood.

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

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

If Saying That Religion Should Be A Private Matter And Should Not Have Special Influence In Public Life Is Illiberal, Then 74% Of U.k. Christians Are Illiberal, Too.

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!

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.

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

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

Do You Advocate The Ten Commandments As A Guide To The Good Life? Then I Can Only Presume That You Don't Know The Ten Commandments.

Ten Commandments

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

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

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

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

Evil…doesn’t Mean Doing Things That Have Bad Consequences For People. It Means Private Thoughts And Actions That Are Not To “the Christian Majority’s” Private Liking.

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.

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

If A Healing Technique Is Demonstrated To Have Curative Properties In Properly Controlled Double-blind Trials, It Ceases To Be Alternative. It Simply, As Diamond Explains, Becomes Medicine.

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.

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

Natural Selection Is Anything But Random.

Natural Selection

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

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 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.

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

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think And Evaluate Evidence. Faith Is Belief In Spite Of, Even Perhaps Because Of, The Lack Of Evidence.

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

I 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.

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 God Wanted To Create Life And Create Humans, It Would Be Slightly Odd That He Should Choose The Extraordinarily Roundabout Way Of Waiting For 10 Billion Years Before Life Got Started And Then Waiting For Another 4 Billion Years Until You Got Human Beings Capable Of Worshipping And Sinning And All The Other Things Religious People Are Interested In.

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.

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.

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

It Is Grindingly, Creakingly, Crashingly Obvious That If Darwinism Was Really A Theory Of Chance, It Could Not Work.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

When I Sign Books, I Get Lines Of People And What They Usually Say Is: "thank You. You Have Changed My Life." I Am Really Moved By That.

Religion Is About Turning Untested Belief Into Unshakable Truth Through The Power Of Institutions And The Passage Of Time.

The Evidence For Evolution Is So Compelling That The Only Way To Save The Creation Theory Is To Assume That God Deliberately Planted Enormous Quantities Of Evidence To Make It Look As If Evolution Had Happened.

Enormous Quantities

It Sounds Superficially Fair. But It Presupposes That That There Is Something In Christian Theology To Be Ignorant About. The Entire Thrust Of My Position Is That Christian Theology Is A Non-subject. It Is Empty. Vacuous. Devoid Of Coherence Or Content. I Imagine That Mcgrath Would Join Me In Expressing Disbelief In Fairies, Astrology And Thor's Hammer. How Would He Respond If A Fairyologist, Astrologer Or Viking Accused Him Of Ignorance Of Their Respective Subjects?

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

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.

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 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.

The Assignment Of Purpose To Everything Is Called Teleology. Children Are Native Teleologists, And Many Never Grow Out Of It.

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

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.

People Will Say, "you're Never Going To Convince Me That Something As Complicated As An Eye Could Come About By Sheer Chance." And The Answer Is That Natural Selection Is The Very Opposite Of Sheer Chance. Natural Selection Is A Non-random Process.

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.

Like Computer Viruses, Successful Mind Viruses Will Tend To Be Hard For Their Victims To Detect. If You Are The Victim Of One, The Chances Are That You Won't Know It, And May Even Vigorously Deny It.

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

Secularism Is Categorically Not Saying That The Religious May Not Speak Out Publicly Or Have A Say In Public Life. It Is About Saying That Religion Alone Should Not Confer A Privileged Say In Public Life, Or Greater Influence On It. It Really Is As Simple As That.

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.

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.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

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

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

The Bishop Goes On To The Human Eye, Asking Rhetorically, And With The Implication That There Is No Answer, 'how Could An Organ So Complex Evolve?' This Is Not An Argument, It Is Simply An Affirmation Of Incredulity.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realise That We Are Apes. Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees And Gorillas Is Much More Recent Than Their Common Ancestor With The Asian Apes - The Gibbons And Orangutans. There Is No Natural Category That Includes Chimpanzees, Gorillas And Orangutans But Excludes Humans.

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.

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

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

…the Genesis Story Is Just One That Happened To Have Been Adopted By One Particular Tribe Of Middle Eastern Herders. It Has No More Special Status Than The Belief Of A Particular West African Tribe That The World Was Created From The Excrement Of Ants.

Evolution Is A Theory In A Special Philosophical Sense Of Science, But In Terms Of Ordinary Laymen's Use Of Language, It's A Fact, .. Evolution Is A Fact In The Same Sense That It's A Fact That The Earth Is Round And Not Flat, [that] The Earth Goes Round The Sun. Both Those Are Also Theories, But They're Theories That Have Never Been Disproved And Never Will Be Disproved.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

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?

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.

There's An Element Of Paradox There - That At Least You Know Where You Stand With The Fundamentalists. I Mean, They're Absolutely Clear In Their Error And Their Stupidity, And So You Can Really Go After Them.

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

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 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.

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

Absolutist Morality Doesn't Have To Come From Religion But Usually Does.

Pope Francis Seems To Be A Much Nicer Man Than Pope Benedict, But I'm Not Sure That His Views On Things That Really Matter Are All That Different. Whereas Benedict Was Perhaps A Wolf In Wolf's Clothing, Francis Is Perhaps A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing.

...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.

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.

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 Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

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.

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

The Universe Doesn't Owe You A Sense Of Hope

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.

You Can't Statistically Explain Improbable Things Like Living Creatures By Saying That They Must Have Been Designed Because You're Still Left To Explain The Designer, Who Must Be, If Anything, An Even More Statistically Improbable And Elegant Thing.

When You Plant A Fertile Meme In My Mind You Literally Parasitize My Brain, Turning It Into A Vehicle For The Meme's Propagation In Just The Way That A Virus May Parasitize The Genetic Mechanism Of A Host Cell.

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.

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

The Gravitational Constant, If It Were Off By One Part In A Hundred Million Million, Then The Expansion Of The Universe After The Big Bang Would Not Have Occurred In The Fashion That Was Necessary For Life To Occur. When You Look At That Evidence, It Is Very Difficult To Adopt The View That This Was Just Chance.

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.

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.

We Should Learn To Understand Natural Selection, So That We Can Oppose Any Tendency To Apply It To Human Politics.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Most Of The Ones [nobel Prizes] That Have Gone To Muslims Have Been Peace Prizes, And The [number Of Muslims] Who Have Gotten Them For Scientific Work Is Exceedingly Low. But In Jews, It Is Exceedingly High.

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

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

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

Religions Are Not Imaginative, Not Poetic, Not Soulful. On The Contrary, They Are Parochial, Small-minded, Niggardly With The Human Imagination, Precisely Where Science Is Generous.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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.

My God Is Not Improbable To Me. He Has No Need Of A Creation Story For Himself Or To Be Fine-tuned By Something Else.

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

Mutation Is Random; Natural Selection Is The Very Opposite Of Random.

It Is All Too Easy To Mistake Passion That Can Change Its Mind For Fundamentalism, Which Never Will.

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

I Think That [paul] Bloom's Approach - And Others Who Take It - Is Not So Much That There Is A Precise Genetic Basis To Faith. But There Is A Genetic Basis To A Psychological Predisposition That Manifests Itself As Faith And Religion Under The Right Conditions.

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.

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

I Think I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

Islamic Myths Are Mostly Actually Plagiarized From The Christian Ones, Both Biblically And In Terms Of Modern Creationism. If You Read Islamic Creationist Literature, It's Pretty Much Lifted From American Evangelical Literature.

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

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

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

People Who Do Not Know The Bible Well Have Been Gulled Into Thinking It Is A Good Guide To Morality. This Mistaken View May Have Motivated The "millionaire Conservative Party Donors". I Have Even Heard The Cynically Misanthropic Opinion That, Without The Bible As A Moral Compass, People Would Have No Restraint Against Murder, Theft And Mayhem. The Surest Way To Disabuse Yourself Of This Pernicious Falsehood Is To Read The Bible Itself.

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

I Don't Understand Why So Many People Who Are Sophisticated In Science Go On Believing In God. I Wish I Did.

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.

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?

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

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

Do Those People Who Hold Up The Bible As An Inspiration To Moral Rectitude Have The Slightest Notion Of What Is Actually Written In It?

Certainly I See The Scientific View Of The World As Incompatible With Religion, But That Is Not What Is Interesting About It. It Is Also Incompatible With Magic, But That Also Is Not Worth Stressing. 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 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.

The Important Thing To Remember About Mathematics Is Not To Be Frightened

I Just Would Like To Say That Over More Than A Quarter-century As A Scientist And A Believer, I Find Absolutely Nothing In Conflict Between Agreeing With Richard [dawkins] In Practically All Of His Conclusions About The Natural World, And Also Saying That I Am Still Able To Accept And Embrace The Possibility That There Are Answers That Science Isn't Able To Provide About The Natural World - The Questions About Why Instead Of The Questions About How. I'm Interested In The Whys.

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime.

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.

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.

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

Even Those Who Do Not, Or Cannot, Avail Themselves Of A Scientific Education, Choose To Benefit From The Technology That Is Made Possible By The Scientific Education Of Others.

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

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

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