Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?
— Richard Dawkins
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.
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.
'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.
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.
We have the power to turn against our creators.
I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.
It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.
I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.
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.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.
I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.
The word 'excess' has no meaning for a male.
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.
There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.
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.
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.
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
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.'
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.
There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.
The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two miracles.
To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.
Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.
I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.
Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.
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.
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
