I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
I’m pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.
Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.
There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.
I think the world’s always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance.
You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.
It is immoral to brand children with religion. ‘This is a Catholic child.’ ‘That is a Muslim child.’ I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, ‘That is a Marxist child.’
If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
You can’t understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can’t recognise biblical allusions.
People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It’s as though you’ve said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.
The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t.
Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.
I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.
I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.