Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

***
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the
true one.
***
All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them.
***
I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us [...] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that
there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, [...] then the door is
opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith,
I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'
***
Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
***
Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you
sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.
***
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things
might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
***
Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd
think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator
sport?
***
It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins
than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive
himself.
***
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
***
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be
taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
***
Isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their parents? And it always just happens to be the right
religion. Religions run in families. If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece we would all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo. If we
had been born Vikings we would be worshiping Wotan and Thor. How does this come about? Through childhood indoctrination.
***
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying
that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
***
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?
***
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.
***
If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith,
they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.
***
The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.
***
Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop
***
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels
on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both-and mixes explosively with both.
Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world
today.
***
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
***
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
***
The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery,
the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of
true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.
***
Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects,
and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents
belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the
best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues
seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.
***
People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance."
And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.
***
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping
downy seeds into the air. ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that
will shed a new generation of downy seeds. ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing,
fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.
***
Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or
a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further
justification.
***
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.
***
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are
expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
***
If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing
to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous.
***
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.
***
Religion: Together we can find the cure.
***
Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.
***
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.
***
Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use
contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.
***
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are
machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for
living.
***
People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen
constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain
it. But that God himself would be even more improbable.
***
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.
***
Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your
barbecue.
***
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.
***
For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design:
Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer.
But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple
beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.
***
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. 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. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and
largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.
***
On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more
complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that
they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of
complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.
***
Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education,
which likely extends to other fields as well.
***
Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria.
Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.
***
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
***
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.
***
The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow,
gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
***
Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the
consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough
to do so.
***
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in
view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master
watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
***
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a
deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth
living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.
***
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
***
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
***
The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.
***
It's a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe - capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary
process - that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn't think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured
to death.
***
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
***
Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion
about Nazism.
***
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
***
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking
up.
***
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
***
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
***
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of
cells is a colony of bacteria.
***
The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science
has its own magic: the magic of reality.
***
If you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but
they believe different things---they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their
disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do.
***
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when
considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one
god further.
***
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you'd never be confident of things like 'My wife
loves me'. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are
with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't purely inside feeling,
like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in
the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
***
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the
existence of organized complexity.
***
The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible
perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit
atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
***
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.
***
We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But,
like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.
***
Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience
and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to
understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
***
The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.
***
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance
of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
***
Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.
***
I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.
***
Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs
or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.
***
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
***
Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
***
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to
being herded.
***
I can't be sure God does not exist. On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself
a six. That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.
***
I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.
***
If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way
of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable
of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.
***
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.
***
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking
for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.
***
Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are
not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.
***
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.
***
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten
thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
***
The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible - not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about
human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality.
***
[Creationists have] lost in the courts of law; they've long ago lost in the halls of science; and they continue to lose with every new
piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left.
***
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection
and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
***
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of
all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval
equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
***
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.
***
It's about time we start criticizing faith.
***
"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find
the reality thrilling.
***
People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of
North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.
***
I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that,
well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.
***
Human beings are just gene machines.
***
If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will
simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.
***
Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps
especially in children, a tendency to believe what you're told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your
loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all
these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there
is no evidence.
***
I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop
interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really
would like to see religion go away altogether.
***
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth
which still fills me with astonishment.
***
If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its
something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that
means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a
life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully
***
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs
cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.
Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among
themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the
same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
***
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
***
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
***
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
***
Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.
***
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life.
George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons
of mass destruction).
***
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together
anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors,
editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
***
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-
explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
***
You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian.
You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
***
Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to
do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing
so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no
better means to those ends than the scientific way.
***
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even
immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
***
The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
***
My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the
'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of
mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.
***
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you
want to believe in a particular one of them - teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh - the onus is on you to say why you
believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-
unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
***
There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you
damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.
***
My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam
is concerned.
***
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
***
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon
private 'revelation'.
***
Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had
no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution,
would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the
wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.
***
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.
***
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably
true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
***
It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures',
'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid.
***
Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle,
saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think,
unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just
one of many universes.
***
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between.
It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.
***
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
***
Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word
for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were
not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane
courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.
***
However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?
***
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
***
I am passionate about truth and passionate about clarity, and I don't regard myself as particularly militant or aggressive. I simply
wish to discuss what is true and to listen to evidence and put evidence forward to other people and have a sensible, sane, moderated
argument.
***
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is
something that can be remedied by education.
***
Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have
a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied
whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else?
Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond
the grave?
***
...I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or
wherever they have been or will be invented.
***
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself.
And it is. But it's not supernatural.
***
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
***
Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it
as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell
them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.
***
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
***
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian
selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes
- and as with memes in their original version.
***
It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They
serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement
with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the
afterlife.
***
It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any
animal merely statistical - not deterministic.
***
There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I
think that does need a Darwinian explanation.
***
An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know
that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the
knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian
pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.
***
Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, ..
Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both
those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.
***
There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never
have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
***
Offense is what people take when they can't take argument.
***
All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence,
that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
***
Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a
principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a
model for that very thesis.
***
Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something
constructive about human suffering.
***
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
***
It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second,
uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not
understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for
‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
***
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 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
***
Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival
theories.
***
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.
***
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
***
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
***
In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission
from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of
days off that had been purchased. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the
greatest con tricks in history.
***
A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but
it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
***
I remember at the age of six regaling my poor little sister with stories about the planets, and how far away they were and which
ones might have life.
***
Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency
is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a
smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.
***
We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
***
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in
humility.
***
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
***
Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
***
[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.
***
Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.
***
Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
***
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter
nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told
she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes
old enough to do so.
***
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.'
***
I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit
in the solar system.
***
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
***
I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and
reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy,
might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.
***
I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient
in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.
***
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should
count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
***
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?
***
What is the purpose of the universe?" is a silly question.
***
Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of
being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as
supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a
laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet.
***
But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence
of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel
us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe
in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.
***
You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
***
Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named,
for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends
hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.
***
I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature
and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it
provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as
much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.
***
To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say
the answer is God - it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.
***
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose
***
Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring,
an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.
***
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate
fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human
ambitions and perceptions.
***
Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly
it sounds threatening.
***
Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can fvck off.
***
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
***
If you are offended by reading views that disagree with yours, then yes, you will be offended. However, it is not gratuitously
offensive, it simply puts an argument, and if your views are strong enough, as I believe they are, you will be able to defend your
views. You will not say, "Oh, it's offensive, it's offensive." You will say "No, you are wrong here and you are wrong here," and that's
what you should do.
***
We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.
***
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of
them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
***
If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
***
Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.
***
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation
forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not
plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is
the blind watchmaker.
***
In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to
promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our
good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have
babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small
groups.
***
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
***
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.
***
Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what
you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none,
is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre
like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings.
***
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.
***
Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?
***
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.
***
I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what
anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.
***
Natural selection is anything but random.
***
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.
***
Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.
***
Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.
***
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
***
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human
culture.
***
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color,
bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in
the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—
as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
***
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
***
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed,
eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
***
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
***
Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.
***
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
***
I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by
evidence.
***
[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
***
I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.
***
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical
allusions.
***
The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
***
The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious
propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children
***
Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved
a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or
discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that
have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of
religion.
***
The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in
comparison. Thomas demanded evidence… The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held
to us as worthy of imitation.
***
To fill a world with... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
used.
***
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to,
because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
***
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?
***
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of
looking after himself.
***
You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person
has got to believe in evolution.
***
Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls",
and the "no-contests."
***
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.
***
There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For
those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is
the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to
another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in
unfamiliar ways.
***
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
***
...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the
other available religions.
***
It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they're
the right religion.
***
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to
authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to 'come out,' thereby encouraging others to do
so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.
***
Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable
(many people cannot tell the difference)
***
I think the important thing to learn is that we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism,
Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the
supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a
treasured heritage.
***
There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
***
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
***
In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our
parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for
astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the
constructive skepticism of adult science.
***
I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I
mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.
***
Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is
now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important
research data.
***
Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.
***
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation
in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
***
[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other
big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
***
I have never quite understood - and this is no doubt my failing - I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand
the human condition.
***
I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
***
I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.
***
To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I
am so hostile to organized religion.
***
The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it?
Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality,
would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.
***
I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a
complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly
simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God
himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.
***
There are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.
***
We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately
with this business called religion.
***
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten
Commandments.
***
As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold
respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers
***
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.
***
Theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Issac should not be taken as literal fact. And the appropriate response
is twofold: first, many, many people even to this day, do take the whole of their Scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great
deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not of literal fact, how
should we take the story? As an alagory? Then an alagory for what? Surely, nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? But what
kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?
***
If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by
guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or
an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow
ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and
simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!
***
Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago,
say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
***
I've never heard of William Craig. A debate with him might look good on his resume, but it wouldn't look good on mine!
***
In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.
***
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays
seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.
***
There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.
***
The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes
from the latin mundus, meaning 'the world'. And the world is anything but dull: The world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the
real world. Science is the poetry of reality.
***
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.
***
The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The
vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant.
But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.
***
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun
to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
***
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
***
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
***
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.
***
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated
themselves from Darwinian selection.
***
[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
***
Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It
cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
***
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of
Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies.
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't
we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
***
So Occam's razor - Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward - leads me more to
believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.
***
Religion and science have nothing to do with each other, they're about different things, science is about the way the world works
and religion is about [...] miracles. [...] And in any case, if you ask most ordinary people in church or in a mosque why they believe,
it's almost certainly got something to do with the belief that God does wonderful things, that God intervenes, that God heals the
sick, that God answers prayers, God forgives sins.
***
One of the possible reasons why we might be good is that we're frightened, frightened of God. We want the reward in Heaven, we
don't want to go to Hell. That would be an ignoble, ignominious reason for being good, and I think that if anybody was good to
you just because they hoped for a heavenly reward, you wouldn't respect them, you'd probably give them a wide berth.
***
As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to
change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.
***
People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs
on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.
***
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic
moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot
be expected to worry its genes.
***
Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course
you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.
***
To invoke the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing - for it leaves
unexplained the origin of the Designer.
***
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic
explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
***
I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we
still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious
ad hoc magic.
***
And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life
will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.
***
[R]eductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist
will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a
reductionist in any sense worth being against.
***
People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, Evolution is only a theory. That is correct, but it's important to understand
what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun - it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount
of evidence. There are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within evolution, there is some room for controversy. But
that we are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say, that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word.
***
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
***
There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can
only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial
sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write-words.
***
I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using
threats in order to propagate those beliefs.
***
If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about
believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.
***
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of
irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
***
bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and
no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.
***
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
***
Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the
Christian majority’s” private liking.
***
…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no
more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
***
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming,
hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
***
If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment-thereby,
incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin
pass down in the semen too?
***
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.
***
If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse
works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex
process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
***
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.
***
Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false
morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one
monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.
***
Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence.
We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use
words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of?
It's just an opinion.
***
I read in the paper today the list of the most popular boys' names in Britain. The first was Jack, the second was Mohammed. That
makes me feel a little bit worried.
***
Public sharing is an important part of science.
***
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.
***
Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.
***
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close
examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
***
The replicators that exist tend to be the ones that are good at manipulating the world to their own advantage. But other replicators
are also successful otherwise they would not be common. The world therefore tends to become populated by mutually compatible
sets of successful replicators, replicators that get on well together
***
The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich
Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.
***
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.
***
It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire
thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine
that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a
fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?
***
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.
***
Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private
virgins in the next.
***
There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.
***
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology
journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
***
Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But
it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.
***
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.
***
Without gradualness... we are back to a miracle.
***
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that
God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot
yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the
discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to
church, where it belongs.
***
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
***
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the
genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.
***
If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change
my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.
***
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all
time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how
everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
***
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
***
Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand.
Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking
about quantum theory all along.
***
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
***
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of
anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is
that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.
***
The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If
manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a
Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.
***
The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted
enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.
***
Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science
does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.
***
The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's
Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier
times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).
***
I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and
specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.
***
Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.
***
People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality. This mistaken view may have
motivated the "millionaire Conservative party donors". I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the
Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself
of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.
***
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
***
It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty
things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in
Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.
***
[Jay] Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative
power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the
majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.
***
My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about.
***
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish
State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably
deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really
was the historic homeland of the Jews.
***
I find that religion really does motivate people to do horrible things because they have this passionate faith in whatever their
religion happens to be, and it teaches them that the other religion is the wrong one.
***
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
***
'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.
***
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist
authors.
***
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be
destroyed in the past.
***
It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur
of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play
it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives
would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?
***
What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they
made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations
***
Pope Francis seems to be a much nicer man than Pope Benedict, but I'm not sure that his views on things that really matter are
all that different. Whereas Benedict was perhaps a wolf in wolf's clothing, Francis is perhaps a wolf in sheep's clothing.
***
The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of
complexity.
***
It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality,
are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.
***
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me
to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with
fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all species are dying of starvation, thirst,
and disease. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
***
There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .
***
The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues
***
The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The
distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts
all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
***
Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.
***
To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it,
he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground,
the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.
***
If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should
just shut up about it.
***
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.
***
When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved
by that.
***
Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant with of their review. But in
criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent
scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion
employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'.
***
Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed
fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as
one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild
chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared!
Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest.
***
The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think
that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.
***
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.
***
Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a Marxist child or an Anarchist child or a Post-modernist child. Yet children are
routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too
young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that.
***
If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be
religious!
***
Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach
themselves to.
***
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of
evolution was false.
***
It can be consoling to think your children are in heaven. You have got to understand that that doesn't make it true. Many people
cannot understand that distinction.
***
When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very
great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
***
I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be
born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually.
Everyone should learn that.
***
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant
children' or 'Islamic children.'
***
Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe
seems to be so finely tuned.
***
It is a virtue to admit ignorance when you don't know, but not to wallow in ignorance as an end in itself.
People say if we don't believe god is watching over us, we abandon morality. Are they right?
***
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in
it?
***
Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.
***
Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.
***
I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.
***
Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window.
***
Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to
hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are
hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals.
***
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but
decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.
***
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the
words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to
believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a
woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than
deeds.
***
Religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them,
we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as
death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements
about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
***
I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
***
My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer
and not many designers?
***
I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately
responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much
wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her
to think, without telling her what to think.
***
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose
your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have
to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.
***
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.
***
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
***
By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!
***
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K.
Christians are illiberal, too.
***
If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly
miraculous events.
***
There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too
surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope
with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.
***
The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ
so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.
***
Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill.
But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.
***
It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they
are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false
accusations of blasphemy.
***
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a
substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.
***
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody
else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern
hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose
to disprove it.
***
All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.
***
Segregation has no place in the education system.
***
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the
thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.
***
The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes
of DNA messages give or take a few mutations are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of
years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism
should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.
***
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
***
God is an idea that people believe in and I spend time arguing with people that subscribe to that idea(man made idea).
***
The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.
***
Most of the ones [Nobel prizes] that have gone to Muslims have been peace prizes, and the [number of Muslims] who have gotten
them for scientific work is exceedingly low. But in Jews, it is exceedingly high.
***
There is something wrong with using faith - belief without evidence - as a political weapon. I wouldn't say there is something
similar about using science. Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real,
something that happens, something that works.
***
I think that [Paul] Bloom's approach - and others who take it - is not so much that there is a precise genetic basis to faith. But there
is a genetic basis to a psychological predisposition that manifests itself as faith and religion under the right conditions.
***
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-
delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
***
Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you
read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
***
Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe. Not what experts, in their pontificating wisdom,
instruct us to believe... No, science tells us what there is good reason to believe.
***
Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
***
I hate the neologism "owned" for "scored a victory over". I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
***
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.
***
Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because
at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it
actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes.
***
St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back
from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.
***
We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.
***
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or
four times over.
***
It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that
physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a
rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the
universe as we know it wouldn't exist.
***
When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a
gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.
***
I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.
***
Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to
answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
***
We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.
***
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
***
Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of
as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith
can get distorted as positions are hardened.
***
I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about
evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes -
and that's because I am passionate about the truth... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.
***
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made
light of that.
***
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
***
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
***
If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting
when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.
***
People like to trace their ancestry.
***
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
***
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
***
I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.
***
The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.
***
I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.
***
Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.
***
People will listen to sophisticated physicists, using God as a kind of metaphor for the deep constants, the deep problems, the deep
principles of physics, and say that in that sense I believe in God. The reaction is, "Oh, this great physicist believes in God - that
means I'm free to believe in the trinity and in the crucifixion and in the reincarnation of Christ" - and all that stuff, which of course
has nothing whatever to do with the fundamental constants of physics, which is what these physicists are talking about.
***
More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus
afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals
were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?
***
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
***
Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
***
In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the
intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.
***
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.
***
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of
humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.
***
You can't blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, 'This is an exceedingly powerful tool.' And you
want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.
***
Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that
they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here).
***
We are a very, very unusual species.
***
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and
prospered.
***
I think there in a great deal to be said for religious education in the sense of teaching about religion and biblical literacy. Both
those things, by the way, I suspect will prepare a child to give up religion. If you are taught comparative religion, you are more
likely to realise that there are other religions than the one you have been brought up in. And if you are if you are taught to read the
bible, I can think of almost nothing more calculated to turn you off religion.
***
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.
***
It could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a
particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small - at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think
that's the case.
***
The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential
reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.
***
I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression
that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong
religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.
***
I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
***
Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.
***
When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought
were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea.
***
I don't shout people down. I argue people down, perhaps.
***
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 am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.
***
People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven't read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and
individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism.
***
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate
pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
***
There's a natural tendency for children to, in some sense, inherit the cultural values of their parents. I'm not against that, that's
fine, that's wonderful. What I am against is labelling. Nobody ever labels a child a cricketer because his father is a cricketer, but
they do label a child a Catholic because his parents are Catholic. I think it's more or less unique. Nobody ever labels a child a
socialist or a conservative or a liberal because that's what their parents are.
***
Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small
or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.
***
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.
***
It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."
***
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too
often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-
fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
***
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the
human condition.
***
I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That
inspires an even more dug-in position.
***
DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in
which it resides.
***
There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.
***
Francis [Collins] keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then
suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific - really scientific - credibility. I'm sorry to be so
blunt.
***
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
***
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
***
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no
reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
***
My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.
***
I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as
I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in
the world.
***
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.
***
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a
radio would have seemed like a miracle.
***
Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest
thinker.
***
I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished
view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If
you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world
because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis.
***
I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
***
Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there
that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did
the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses.
***
I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.
***
Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.
***
I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children
to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.
***
I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest
that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.
***
The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
***
Faith is the lack of evidence, and it shouldn't be that difficult to convince people that the right reason to believe something is that
there is evidence for it. People do not innately go for this view, but nevertheless it is not that difficult to teach.
***
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing
- a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
***
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion
that Darwin was right.
***
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.
***
Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human
imagination, precisely where science is generous.
***
I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus...
Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus.
It does its job magnificently well. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out.
***
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
***
Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that
religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, "If science can't do something therefore religion can.
***
Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They
are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
***
I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing
book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.
***
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.
***
Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were
breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that
bottles are common it can do so.
***
Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they
get him there by different routes.
***
If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that
is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty
University who may be here to leave and go to a proper university.
***
I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.
***
The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I
fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously
disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.
***
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant
proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.
***
This person should have been aborted years ago.
***
If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it
up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?
***
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.
***
Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But
today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient
worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.
***
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.
***
I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.
***
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas
is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category
that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.
***
Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would
turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit
and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.
***
If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often
surprise you in the result.
***
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging
criticism rather than stifling it.
***
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they
are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over,
they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are
their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are
forever.
***
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed
of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom
is in the next sports stadium.
***
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.
***
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to
believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.
***
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by
a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
***
The universe doesn't owe you a sense of hope
***
A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another
retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.
***
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You
could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.
***
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
***
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking,
and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
***
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
***
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.
***
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into
princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.
***
I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand
quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we
come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?
***
Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers
no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain,
and leaves it at that.
***
Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far, and his first book, Creation: Life and How
to Make It, is as interesting as you would expect. But he illuminates more than just the properties of life: his originality extends to
matter itself and the very nature of reality. Not since David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality have I encountered such a compelling
invitation to think everything out afresh, from the bottom up.
***
We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.
***
A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department
when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall,
shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have
been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the
House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response!
***
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.
***
Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more
moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivasection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! The only reason
we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.
***
The Universe does not owe us meaning.
***
There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life,
for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like
smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes.
***
Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black
one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only
fiction, only entertainment."
***
Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths. Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? ...
A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific
matter?
***
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between
Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.
***
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
***
Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have
implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that
if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to
both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.
***
In the beginning was simplicity.
***
Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state
of nature.
***
[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West.
***
If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually
understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
***
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.
'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends
will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to
'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
***
... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
***
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the
science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually
very valuable.
***
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.
***
Have they discovered evolution yet?
***
It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.
***
If you are religious at all, it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and
you think Christianity is true and Islam false (knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in
Afghanistan), you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
***
My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then
move on to a clean table in a clean room - or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden.
Trash that table and move on again.
***
Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never
evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.
***
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for
an answer.
***
...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary
intermediates happen to be extinct.
***
Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to
predict what will happen and when.
***
That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the
understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly
leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its
development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an
absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.
***
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
***
If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly
substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've
been brought up to.
***
American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
***
I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own
right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought
justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.
***
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.
***
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.
***
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval
and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance
camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.
***
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'
***
Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over,
and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the
old.
***
Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the
ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme"
spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.
***
Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they
are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to
believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always
feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.
***
I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.
***
It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy,
but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working
hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
***
As my colleague, the physical chemist Peter Atkins, puts it, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a teapot in
orbrit around the planet Pluto. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with
the theory that there isn't.
***
Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but ... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and
Wallace solved it ... I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this
deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!
***
If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child
abuse.
***
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even
discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature,
something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. 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.
***
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with
increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
***
I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem
coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by
throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the
cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize
David Attenborough's television ratings?
***
I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up
our values and social lives.
***
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions...
If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.
***
It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
***
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.
***
Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to
be pegged to an item in the news.
***
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
***
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.
***
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
***
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair
defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science
believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
***
I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
***
Evolution never looks to the future.
***
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our
symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
***
My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.
***
Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a
therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually
bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily
dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.
***
The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of
things that would be otherwise inexplicable.
***
Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say
something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists.
***
Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
***
The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell,
the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.
***
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is
for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.
***
Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I
have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an
intellectual banana-skin experience.
***
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
***
With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible,
open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient
patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
***
[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently
available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't
really matter
***
We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.
***
There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't
want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.
***
Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.
***
The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey
a powerful illusion of deliberate design.
***
It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means
to a very, very high level of technology- and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. And I suppose it's
possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a
signature of some sort of designer.
***
I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
***
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the
teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
***
What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information.
It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and
then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major revolution in the whole history of our
understanding of ourselves. It's something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin would have loved it, I'm absolutely
sure.
***
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that
God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a
position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been
logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
***
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal
and unquenchable fires of hell?
***
Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one
thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually
most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.
***
Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle
and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry
***
Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even
more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
***
Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something
so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the
reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.
***
I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
***
In other words Luke's story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah's
prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama.
Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the
reality thrilling.
***
Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.
***
Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets
results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory
(heaven knows, I don't), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be
wrong.
***
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.
***
Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently
checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire
as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.
***
The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of
time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.
***
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
***
Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.
***
We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means,
and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means
anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.
***
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy,
still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene
panting far behind.
***
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in
the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from
extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
***
The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is
a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational
euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact would be all the greater.
***
I love romantic poetry.
***
Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what
they were collectively brought up to believe.
***
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
***
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for
regret.
***
If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is
room for bargaining.
***
The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of
astrologers.
***
However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least
as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747
***
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.
***
I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
***
At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.
***
Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a
developmental program.
***
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
***
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
***
Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious
to us.
***
If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the
mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
***
I don't see that [Richard] Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.
***
The so-called sophisticated theologians, especially ones who are very nice, like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks, you
sometimes don't quite know where you are with them. You feel that when you attack them, you're attacking a wet sponge.
***
I do like Philip Pullman. And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
***
The recurrent laryngeal nerve - which runs from the head to the voice box - goes all the way down into the chest, loops around a
major artery, then goes all the way back up again. It goes right past the larynx on the way down. All a decent designer would have
to do is loop it off at that point. What we're looking at is the legacy of history.
***
Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?
***
I think Douglas [Adams] is writing with an eye to irony for adults at the same time as entertaining children.
***
I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and
white horses and bats and castles and things.
***
Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
***
My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.
***
There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of
the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.
***
Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get
these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that
because something is complicated, God must have done it.
***
Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and
monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find
continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.
***
I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than [Richard Dawkins]. The difference is that
my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.
***
There's an element of paradox there - that at least you know where you stand with the fundamentalists. I mean, they're absolutely
clear in their error and their stupidity, and so you can really go after them.
***
St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a
science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with
God.
***
I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.
***
Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they
will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on
kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from
the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes.
***
There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology
- relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral
adaptations for the preservation of our genes.
***
God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.
***
The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big
Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult
to adopt the view that this was just chance.
***
We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the
propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.
***
Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's science hero, was a sort of irascible man constantly bellowing at people, so he was a little bit
of a departure from both of those stereotypes.
***
I'm a sucker for nice religious leaders. I fall for it every time.
***
What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by
postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.
***
That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews,
because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.
***
Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and
so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid
reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust.
***
Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.
***
It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.
***
By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time.
***
From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's
ability to really weigh in.
***
God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
***
What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to
be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.
***
If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.
***
Evolution is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life - a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you
think about it, before Darwin, we hadn't the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It's still such an exciting idea
that it is well worth everybody understanding it.
***
They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith,
and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.
***
Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory
will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all
independently just happening to fit the bill.
***
Creationists and Holocaust deniers are both very similar - both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of
Holocaust deniers it's more recent history, but in both cases the evidence - in favour of the Holocaust and evolution - is simply
overwhelming. That doesn't mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history.
***
Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing
teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.
***
I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.
***
Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.
***
Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more
sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.
***
Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn't
probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I
think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.
***
We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with
detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it's like the
difference between Matthew and Luke's Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human
and a chimp, it's like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.
***
You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when
they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value
in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the
juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.
***
It is important not to confuse race and religion.
***
The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't
blame science for that.
***
In Britain you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8.
But I could be wrong about that.
***
What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist
colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply
ceased to give them the time of day.
***
I think that [Jay] Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the
science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf.
***
I've seen [Lalla Ward] episodes of "Doctor Who." They're good, at least partly because the scripts were written by Douglas Adams.
***
If you want to do bad things, science is the most powerful way to do them.
***
For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The
embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist
moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment."
***
I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict
between agreeing with Richard [Dawkins] in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am
still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world -
the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys.
***
Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.
***
I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability
comes from. Now [Francis] Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well,
what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're
struggling to understand."
***
There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
***
Faith is not the opposite of reason.
***
I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy
satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.
***
There isn't [in new atheism]. Nothing that wasn't in Bertrand Russell or probably Robert Ingersoll. But I suppose it is more of a
political effect, in that all these books happened to come out at the same time. I like to think that we have some influence.
***
Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.
***
It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by
placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.
***
I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law.
It's very important to have a moral education.
***
What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes
organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.
***
If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus?
***
I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that we get our morals from scripture because if we did we'd be stoning people for working
on the Sabbath or switching on a light on the Sabbath. So the point is that you can find good bits of the Bible but you have to
cherry-pick, you have reject the nasty bits and pick the nice bits.
***
Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a
science book for young people?
***
I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design.
Random genetic drift can't produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running.
But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level.
***
I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally
Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the
claims made by religions.
***
We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that
therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
***
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or
insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). If that gives you offence, I'm sorry. You are probably not stupid, insane or
wicked; and ignorance is no crime in a country with strong local traditions of interference in the freedom of biology educators to
teach the central theorem of their subject.
***
You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which
lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and
that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I
am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the
scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with
magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable
and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.
***
What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.
***
Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the £740,000
reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why
don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers
would evaporate and bang go the ratings? Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of
telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle
unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new
fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in
possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the
answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.
***
More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's
turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively
different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims,
and this means scientific claims.
***
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a
crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be
lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous
because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous
because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought
into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!
***
The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane
people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles.
You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality.
Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or
more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George
Bush.
***
Well, what if I'm wrong, I mean — anybody could be wrong. We could all be wrong about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the
pink unicorn and the flying teapot. You happen to have been brought up, I would presume, in a Christian faith. You know what
it's like to not believe in a particular faith because you're not a Muslim. You're not a Hindu. Why aren't you a Hindu? Because you
happen to have been brought up in America, not in India. If you had been brought up in India, you'd be a Hindu. If you had been
brought up in Denmark in the time of the Vikings, you'd be believing in Wotan and Thor. If you were brought up in classical
Greece, you'd be believing in Zeus. If you were brought up in central Africa, you'd be believing in the great Juju up the mountain.
There's no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought
up and ask me the question, "What if I'm wrong?" What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea?
***
But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible
to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply
equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we
might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music
lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and
they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened
even to put the question?
***
Even sticking to the higher plane of love, is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it
with parental love (parents are reproached if they don't at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food,
of wine (love of Chateau Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don't feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with
the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends . . . why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly
acknowledges without even thinking about it?
***
I'm not one of those who wants to stop Christian traditions. This is historically a Christian country. I'm a cultural Christian the
same way as many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. So, yes, I love singing carols along with
everybody else. I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
***
It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God
knows we don't want them to get it from scripture, I mean, just look at scripture. Or, from being afraid of God, being intimidated
by God. Anybody who is good for only those two reasons is not really being good at all. Why not teach children things like the
Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, how would you like it if other children did that to you, so why do you do it to them... I
think it's depressing that anybody should suggest that you actually need God in order to be moral. I would hope that our morals
come from a better source than that, and therefore they are genuinely moral rather than based on outmoded scripture, or based
on fear.
***
"I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives
think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly
a little bit more than you do. There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens
and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to
be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I
think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.
Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was
one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about
infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I
think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?' "
***
As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and
freedom of choice.
***
Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly
deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues
lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is
almost entirely Muslims.
***
The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy,
punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an
absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I'd almost say,
intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to
live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don't believe
in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are
all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed
over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy.
These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You
search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and
you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore.
We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we've grown out it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational
discussion.
***
I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they
stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your
ridiculous ideas."
***
"Imagine you are God. You’re all-powerful, nothing is beyond you. You’re all-loving. So it is really, really important to you that
humans are left in no doubt about your existence and your loving nature, and exactly what they need to do in order to get to heaven
and avoid eternity in the fires of hell. It’s really important to you to get that across. So what do you do? Well, if you’re Jehovah,
apparently this is what you do. You talk in riddles. You tell stories which on the surface have a different message from the one you
apparently want us to understand. You expect us to hear X, and instinctively understand that it needs to be interpreted in the light
of Y, which you happen to have said in the course of a completely different story 500-1,000 years earlier. Instead of speaking
directly into our heads - which God has presumed the capability of doing so - simply, clearly and straightforwardly in terms which
the particular individual being addressed will immediately understand and respond to positively - you steep your messages in
symbols, in metaphors. In fact, you choose to convey the most important message in the history of creation in code, as if you
aspired to be Umberto Eco or Dan Brown. Anyone would think your top priority was to keep generation after generation after
generation of theologians in meaningless employment, rather than communicate an urgent life-or-death message to the creatures
you love more than any other."
***
I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th
and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back
a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same
standards as I or anyone would today.
***
People are terrified of being thought racist, there's an awful confusion in many people's minds. They think Islam is a race, which
of course it isn't.
***
If you're seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.
***
I'm all for offending people's religion. I think it should be offended at every opportunity.
***
In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up
Islam, they are in particular danger.
***
Science is the best way to do anything (if you want to do terrible things with technology, a terrible weapons for example science is
the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything)
***
evidence is the only good reason to believe anything
***
It's tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it's a worse temptation to say all religions are equally
bad because they're not. If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it's quite apparent that at present
the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam. It's terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn't mean all
Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else. They suffer from the homophobia,
the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, Isis and the Iranian regime. So it is a major evil in the world,
we do have to combat it, but we don't do what Trump did and say all Muslims should be shut out of the country. That's draconian,
that's illiberal, inhumane and wicked. I am against Islam not least because of the unpleasant effects it has on the lives of Muslims.
***
The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think,
he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as
a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene’s eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing,
not a different theory.
***
Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. First the general
reader, the layman. For him I have avoided technical jargon almost totally, and where I have had to use specialized words I have
defined them. [...] My second imaginary reader was the expert. He has been a harsh critic, sharply drawing in his breath at some
of my analogies and figures of speech. His favourite phrases are ‘with the exception of’; ‘but on the other hand’; and ‘ugh’. I listened
to him attentively, and even completely rewrote one chapter entirely for his benefit, but in the end I have had to tell the story my
way. The expert will still not be totally happy with the way I put things. Yet my greatest hope is that even he will find something
new here; a new way of looking at familiar ideas perhaps; even stimulation of new ideas of his own. If this is too high an aspiration,
may I at least hope that the book will entertain him on a train? The third reader I had in mind was the student, making the
transition from layman to expert. If he still has not made up his mind what field he wants to be an expert in, I hope to encourage
him to give my own field of zoology a second glance. There is a better reason for studying zoology than its possible ‘usefulness’,
and the general likeableness of animals. This reason is that we animals are the most complicated and perfectly-designed pieces of
machinery in the known universe. Put it like that, and it is hard to see why anybody studies anything else!
***
We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What
is man?
***
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
***
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally
ought to behave.
***
Darwin's ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by
stable things.
***
Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not
inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children
by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.
***
No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't
die young!
***
Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of
trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal.
...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened
is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.
***
The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.
***
Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.
***
... it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark
of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.
***
... a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as
competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.
***
What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular
bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.
***
It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain
still who you yourself are!
***
The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs ... are examples of the working
in nature of the kin-selection principle.
***
But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be
misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.
***
A system whereby each child told the parent how hungry he was would be ideal for the parent, and, as we have seen, such a system
seems to have evolved. But the young are in a strong position to lie, because they know exactly how hungry they are, while the
parent can only guess whether they are telling the truth or not. It is almost impossible for a parent to detect a small lie, although
it might see through a big one.
***
One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is
strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females
that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress
flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the
peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special
cases, like actors, men do not.
***
Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old
king's genes.
***
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look. What the Darwinian corpus gives us is not detailed
expectations about particular organisms. It gives us something subtler and more valuable: understanding of principle. But if we
must have myths, the real facts about vampires could tell a different moral tale.
***
Replicators are no longer peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies—individual bodies. And phenotypic
consequences, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into those same bodies.
But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for
life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.
***
However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.
***
To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves
unexplained the origin of the Designer.
***
Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.
***
Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.
***
It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated,
so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.
***
There has been progress in design, but not progress in accomplishment.
***
The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in
practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.
***
There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.
***
This not only misses the point, it is the precise antithesis of the point.
***
There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This
property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.
***
There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when
increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized
individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits
evolutionary stasis (i.e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for
trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful
continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.
***
Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because
predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms
races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech
weaponry that animals display.
***
It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software
co-evolution.
***
It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with
intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.
***
The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced
beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present
conditions are likely to be highly misleading.
***
The late Christopher Evans, a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer, and
over the same time period, "Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for £35, it would do three million miles to the gallon,
and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2 And if you were interested in miniaturisation, you could place half a dozen of
them on a pinhead."
***
I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly
instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?
***
Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that
make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These
qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced
accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.
***
The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment – that it should obey a program of coded instructions – is again only
quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes
don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather
than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards
the wall, to shake like a maniac, to "speak in tongues" – the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion
alone is extensive – are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.
***
Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to
front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball
cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.
***
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the
chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own
mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical
symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).
***
The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.
***
Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in
bodies that die young or without reproducing.
***
The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and
tissues.
***
... the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria ... All earthly living things are certainly descended
from a single ancestor.
***
What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.
***
There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and
bytes of digital information.
***
Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!
***
... it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye ... It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at
least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom ... It is a geological blink.
***
... the true utility function of life, that which is being maximised in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating
free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has made the most of the levers of power at its disposal.
***
... but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favours or disfavours. What natural selection favours
or disfavours is the individual behaviour of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation
in that category.
***
I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian
explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by
individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as
I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't
think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.
***
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before
you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life
and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such
an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.
***
McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy,
with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.
Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might
be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
***
It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are
insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going
to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different
subject.
***
If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into
your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most
effective methods of achieving them.
***
How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium
– in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.
***
You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake
your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.
***
But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been
intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.
***
Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years
ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards ... in your left hand you hold the right hand of
your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on
... How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing
one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.
***
[...] if I am asked for a single phrase to characterize my role as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, I think I would
claim Advocate for Disinterested Truth.
***
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full
of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific
urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
***
The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation...claims...the "Whole substance" of the wine is converted into the blood of
Christ,; the appearance of wine that remains is "merely accidental", "inhering in no substance". Transubstantiation is colloquially
taught as meaning that the wine "literally" turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker
colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like
'substance' and 'literally'.
***
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.
***
This is where they come into their own, for there's money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings.
***
The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas,
fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.
***
There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of
ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding:
Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.
***
Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably
know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And,
next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they
can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
***
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
***
I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been
passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he
completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear
fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal,
of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong
and that scientific truth had been advanced.
***
Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge
to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion".
***
I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous.
***
And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.
***
You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're
frightened of God?
***
Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and
executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than
"barking mad".
***
I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist.
Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people
doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion". (Part 2, 00:35:01)
***
To an atheist [...], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think
the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something
to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism
is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question.
Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true
majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life". But
how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because
they're never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you
think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the
number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should
make the most of our time on this world.
***
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work.
***
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust,
unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
***
I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural,
wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.
***
I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.
***
What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?
***
On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the
comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless
stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion."
***
The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How
did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they
unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’.
***
Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be
true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
***
On the Arguement from Scripture: "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case
that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death
of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mentioned almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus's life. All were then copied
and recopied … by falilible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas."
***
"But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate
record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is
the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?"
***
"The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a
dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even
more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones."
***
"It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus
probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament)
as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity."
***
[...] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
***
"What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both
fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability
up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.
***
"A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.
His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right."
***
On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if
he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest
brain or the largest computer we know."
***
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting
obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish
gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
***
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has
a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. [...] The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full
and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
***
The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped.
Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other
process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for
designing it.
***
Amusingly, it [astrology] falls foul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping. How would we react if a newspaper published a
daily column that read something like this: "Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve
you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey
orders. Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today. British: Your stiff upper lip may serve you
well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life.
***
Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless
irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would
obscure the truth.
***
We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out.
***
Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.
***
So whereabouts in my body might there be a black hole?
***
Isn't Deepak Chopra just exploiting Quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus?
***
The idea that ancient equal years of accumulated wisdom is a fallacy. [...] In medicine, 'ancient' also means developed before we
understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly
look back to a golden age that never was; ours is the golden age of safe tested medicine, effective beyond placebo, in which we've
cut infant mortality and conquered diseases, then forgotten they existed.
***
Sceptical rational inquiry is always the best approach. [...] we can think independently, be truly open-minded. That means asking
questions, being open to real corroborated evidence. Reason has liberated us form superstition and given us centuries of progress.
We abandon it at our peril.
***
"The universe does not owe you a sense of hope. It could be that the world, the universe, is a totally hopeless place. I don't as a
matter of fact think it is, but even if it were - that would not be a good reason for believing in God. You cannot say "I believe in X",
whatever X is - God or anything else - "because that gives me hope". You have to say "I believe in X because there is some evidence
for X". In the case of God - there is not a tiny shred of evidence for the existence of any kind of god.” … “There's plenty of reason
for hope in a Godless world. The universe is a beautiful place. The world is a beautiful place. To understand it in a clear-eyed,
open-eyed way; to look out at the world and to really understand why we exist, what it's all about - that is a hugely uplifting feeling;
That really does give a sense of worth to life, even if life itself is finite, as I believe it is. Nevertheless, it is not a hopeless life without
a god, and to re-divert to my earlier point, even if it were - then it's just illogical to say that that gives you evidence for the belief in
God." [9]
***
In the case of the cosmos, [...] even if we don't understand how it came about, it's not helpful to postulate a creator, because the
creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin
of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it's
difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it's a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a
God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of -
how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.
***
We should be offended when children are denied a proper education. We should be offended when children are told they will
spend eternity in hell. We should be offended when medical science, for example stem-cell research, is compromised by the bigoted
opinions of powerful and above all well-financed ignoramuses. We should be offended when voodoo, of all kinds, is given equal
weight to science. We should be offended by hymen reconstruction surgery. We should be offended by 'female circumcision',
euphemism for genital mutilation. We should be offended by stoning.
***
Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt
evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses
to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant
cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips... continue the list as long as desired.
***
We don't need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as
though they were evidence against evolution.
***
I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god,
and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society
where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want
to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that
that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's
true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to
get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you
get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your
holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it
from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good” - that's a very ignoble
reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the
society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based
on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky.
***
Don't ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say “I don't understand it so it must be a miracle - it must be
supernatural - God did it”. Say instead, that it's a puzzle, it's strange, it's a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the
challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions - the proper and
brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And until we've found a proper answer to the mystery, it's perfectly
ok simply to say “this is something we don't yet understand - but we're working on it”. It's the only honest thing to do. Miracles,
magic and myths, they can be fun. Everybody likes a good story. Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.
The real truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical, in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or
made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic - the magic of reality.
***
Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to
shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to say, ‘Well, actually,
what is wrong with cannibalism?’ Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but
for the following reasons. So I'd like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut
reaction as much as possible.
***
For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being
tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests.
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be
alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal
College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then
become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible
patients).
***
It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of
memes today
***
Some states, e.g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild
touching.
***
Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today
***
With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.
***
Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought.
***
I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert
ABOUT?
***
Saw a down-and-out in Seattle last night. His sign said not "I need food" or "I need a job" but "I need a fat bitch". What could this
mean?
***
I've seen a dog & bitch indulging in full 69. Males of many species including Drosophila lick female genitals before copulation.
***
Who (apart from the pig) is damaged by bacon?
***
Suggest always put Islamic "scholar" in quotes, to avoid insulting true scholars. True scholars have read more than one book.
***
Mild paedophilia is bad. Violent paedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild paedophilia, go away and learn
how to think. Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and
learn how to think.
***
Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
***
Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural
selection.
***
University is about confronting new ideas, unfamiliar, un-"safe". If you want to be "safe" you are not worthy of a university
education.
***
Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. What can we do to help?
***
You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.