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.
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.
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.
Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can f**k off.
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.
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
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.
Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists.
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
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.
Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
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.
Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.
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.
We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.