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.
My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.