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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?

-Richard Dawkins

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Why Did God Make

Richard Dawkins

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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?

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Public Sharing Is An Important Part Of Science.

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

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

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. . . .

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.

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

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

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

Let Children Learn About Different Faiths, Let Them Notice Their Incompatibility, And Let Them Draw Their Own Conclusions About The Consequences Of That Incompatibility. As For Whether They Are ‘valid,’ Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds When They Are Old Enough To Do So.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Thought Provoking

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.

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

Who Are We To Say That That Was An Odd Way To Do It? I Don't Think That It Is God's Purpose To Make His Intention Absolutely Obvious To Us.

When Two Opposite Points Of View Are Expressed With Equal Intensity, The Truth Does Not Necessarily Lie Exactly Half Way Between. It Is Possible For One Side Simply To Be Wrong.

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Evolution Is A Fact, As Securely Established As Any In Science, And He Who Denies It Betrays Woeful Ignorance And Lack Of Education, Which Likely Extends To Other Fields As Well.

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.

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

A Retaliator Behaves Like A Hawk When He Is Attacked By A Hawk, And Like A Dove When He Meets A Dove. When He Meets Another Retaliator He Plays Like A Dove. A Retaliator Is A Conditional Strategist. His Behaviour Depends On The Behaviour Of His Opponent.

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

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

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.

Mysteries Do Not Lose Their Poetry When Solved. Quite The Contrary; The Solution Often Turns Out More Beautiful Than The Puzzle And, In Any Case, When You Have Solved One Mystery You Uncover Others, Perhaps To Inspire Greater Poetry

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

It Is Almost As If The Human Brain Were Specifically Designed To Misunderstand Darwinism, And To Find It Hard To Believe

My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

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

Molecular Biology

Faith Is The Lack Of Evidence, And It Shouldn't Be That Difficult To Convince People That The Right Reason To Believe Something Is That There Is Evidence For It. People Do Not Innately Go For This View, But Nevertheless It Is Not That Difficult To Teach.

However Statistically Improbable The Entity You Seek To Explain By Invoking A Designer, The Designer Himself Has Got To Be At Least As Improbable. God Is The Ultimate Boeing 747

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

The Feature Of Living Matter That Most Demands Explanation Is That It Is Almost Unimaginably Complicated In Directions That Convey A Powerful Illusion Of Deliberate Design.

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

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.

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

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

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

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

You Can Make Some Inferences About A Man's Character If You Know Something About The Conditions In Which He Has Survived And Prospered.

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 Have Never Quite Understood - And This Is No Doubt My Failing - I Never Quite Understood Why You Would Read Fiction To Understand The Human Condition.

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?

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?

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.

Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

Science And Religion

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Even If Not A Single Fossil Has Ever Been Found, The Evidence From Surviving Animals Would Still Overwhelmingly Force The Conclusion That Darwin Was Right.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Evolution May Explain Some Features Of The Moral Law, But It Can't Explain Why It Should Have Any Real Significance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

An Intelligent Couple Can Read Their Darwin And Know That The Ultimate Reason For Their Sexual Urges Is Procreation. They Know That The Woman Cannot Conceive Because She Is On The Pill. Yet They Find That Their Sexual Desire Is In No Way Diminished By The Knowledge. Sexual Desire Is Sexual Desire And Its Force, In An Individual's Psychology, Is Independent Of The Ultimate Darwinian Pressure That Drove It. It Is A Strong Urge Which Exists Independently Of Its Ultimate Rationale.

The Physicist's Problem Is The Problem Of Ultimate Origins And Ultimate Natural Laws. The Biologist's Problem Is The Problem Of Complexity.

The Less You Think, The More You Believe.

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.

Such Is The Breathtaking Speciesism Of Our Christian-inspired Attitudes, The Abortion Of A Single Human Zygote Can Arouse More Moral Solicitude And Righteous Indignation Than The Vivasection Of Any Number Of Intelligent Adult Chimpanzees! The Only Reason We Can Be Comfortable With Such A Double Standard Is That The Intermediates Between Humans And Chimps Are All Dead.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why, I Can't Help Wondering, Is God Thought To Need Such Ferocious Defence? One Might Have Supposed Him Amply Capable Of Looking After Himself.

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.

It Has Become Almost A Cliché To Remark That Nobody Boasts Of Ignorance Of Literature, But It Is Socially Acceptable To Boast Ignorance Of Science And Proudly Claim Incompetence In Mathematics.

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.

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

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.

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?

Does Religion Fill A Much Needed Gap? It Is Often Said That There Is A God-shaped Gap In The Brain Which Needs To Be Filled: We Have A Psychological Need For God -- Imaginary Friend, Father, Big Brother, Confessor, Confidant -- And The Need Has To Be Satisfied Whether God Really Exists Or Not. But Could It Be That God Clutters Up A Gap That We'd Be Better Off Filling With Something Else? Science, Perhaps? Art? Human Friendship? Humanism? Love Of This Life In The Real World, Giving No Credence To Other Lives Beyond The Grave?

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

I Suspect The Reason Is That Most People [...] Have A Residue Of Feeling That Darwinian Evolution Isn't Quite Big Enough To Explain Everything About Life. All I Can Say As A Biologist Is That The Feeling Disappears Progressively The More You Read About And Study What Is Known About Life And Evolution. I Want To Add One Thing More. The More You Understand The Significance Of Evolution, The More You Are Pushed Away From The Agnostic Position And Towards Atheism. Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life. Because I Do Believe In God's Creative Power In Having Brought It All Into Being In The First Place, I Find That Studying The Natural World Is An Opportunity To Observe The Majesty, The Elegance, The Intricacy Of God's Creation.

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

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

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.

Even If It Were True That We Need God To Be Moral, It Would Of Course Not Make God's Existence More Likely, Merely More Desirable (many People Cannot Tell The Difference)

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

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

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."

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.

We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

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

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

I Think There Could Be A Very Large Number Who Are Creationists By Default. Those Are The People I Want To Reach.

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.

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.

Undisguised Clarity Is Easily Mistaken For Arrogance.

Isaac Asimov's Remark About The Infantilism Of Pseudoscience Is Just As Applicable To Religion: 'inspect Every Piece Of Pseudoscience And You Will Find A Security Blanket, A Thumb To Suck, A Skirt To Hold.' It Is Astonishing, Moreover, How Many People Are Unable To Understand That 'x Is Comforting' Does Not Imply 'x Is True'.

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

Purpose Of Life

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

Science Replaces Private Prejudice With Public, Verifiable Evidence.

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

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

I Am Thrilled To Be Alive At Time When Humanity Is Pushing Against The Limits Of Understanding. Even Better, We May Eventually Discover That There Are No Limits.

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.

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

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

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.

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

In True Natural Selection, If A Body Has What It Takes To Survive, Its Genes Automatically Survive Because They Are Inside It. So The Genes That Survive Tend To Be, Automatically, Those Genes That Confer On Bodies The Qualities That Assist Them To Survive.

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.

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

If Something Is True, No Amount Of Wishful Thinking Will Change It.

Wishful Thinking

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.

Most People, I Believe, Think That You Need A God To Explain The Existence Of The World, And Especially The Existence Of Life. They Are Wrong, But Our Education System Is Such That Many People Don't Know It.

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

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?

If Bush And Blair Are Eventually Put On Trial For War Crimes, I Shall Not Be Among Those Pressing For Them To Be Hanged.

There Is Something So Mysterious That It Is Almost Like God. God Is In The Equations. God Is In The Fundamental Constants. And That's Fine. I Mean, That's Just Redefinition Of That Which We Find Mysterious At The Basis Of The Universe.

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

The Book Is True, And If Evidence Seems To Condtradict It, It Is The Evidence That Must Be Thrown Out Not The Book.

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.

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.

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

The Universe Doesn't Owe You A Sense Of Hope

A Universe With A God Would Look Quite Different From A Universe Without One. A Physics, A Biology Where There Is A God Is Bound To Look Different. So The Most Basic Claims Of Religion Are Scientific. Religion Is A Scientific Theory.

I 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."

Such A Bandwidth! God, Who May Not Have A Brain Made Of Neurons, Or A Cpu Made Of Silicon, But If He Has The Powers Attributed To Him He Must Have Something Far More Elaborately And Non-randomly Constructed Than The Largest Brain Or The Largest Computer We Know.

The Enlightenment Is Under Threat. So Is Reason. So Is Truth. So Is Science, Especially In The Schools Of America.

I Do Feel Visceral Revulsion At The Burka Because For Me It Is A Symbol Of The Oppression Of Women.

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.

You Don't Believe That The Earth Is Round Only If You're An Astronaut. You Don't Believe Napoleon Existed Only If You're A Historian. You Believe These Things Because They're Facts, Proved By Evidence.

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.

We Are Digital Archives Of The African Pliocene, Even Of Devonian Seas; Walking Repositories Of Wisdom Out Of The Old Days. You Could Spend A Lifetime Reading In This Ancient Library And Die Unsated By The Wonder Of It.

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

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

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.

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.

[if] There Is Mercy In Nature, It Is Accidental. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

Life Results From The Non-random Survival Of Randomly Varying Replicators. The Watchmaker Is Blind

Evolution Normally Does Not Come To A Halt, But Constantly 'tracks' The Changing Environment.

Changing Environment

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.

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.

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

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

The Total Amount Of Suffering Per Year In The Natural World Is Beyond All Decent Contemplation. During The Minute That It Takes Me To Compose This Sentence, Thousands Of Animals Are Being Eaten Alive, Many Others Are Running For Their Lives, Whimpering With Fear, Others Are Slowly Being Devoured From Within By Rasping Parasites, Thousands Of All Species Are Dying Of Starvation, Thirst, And Disease. The Universe That We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Pitiless Indifference.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Far From Being Demeaning To Human Spiritual Values, Scientific Rationalism Is The Crowning Glory Of The Human Spirit. Of Course You Can Use The Products Of Science To Do Bad Things, But You Can Use Them To Do Good Things Too.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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