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.
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.