No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
Writing a computer virus program is child’s play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.
If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.
The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.
I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.
I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.
Scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.