If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.
I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.
We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.
I don’t think God is an explanation at all. It’s simply redescribing the problem.
Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain’s greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer.
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.
Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.
Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant.
All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them.
Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.
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.
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.
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.