A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won’t take common sense for an answer.
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.
In the beginning was simplicity.
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?
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.
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.
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.
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.
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window.