A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.
If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so.
The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.
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.
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind.
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.
The less you think, the more you believe.
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.
I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don’t buy the argument that, well, it’s harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what’s true.
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
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.
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
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.
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.
It doesn’t hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I’ve actually made comedy out of it. I’ve made light of that.
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.
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.
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.