There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that’s fine. I mean, that’s just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.
The world and the universe are extremely beautiful places, and the more we understand about them the more beautiful they appear.
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all.
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it’s divisive and it’s dangerous.
Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, ’was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.
You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose – and that means evolution.
Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.