It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Theology is ignorance with wings.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling – it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
You can do what you decide to do – but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.