We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
— Richard Dawkins
When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.
I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don't fret about that at all; I'm quite happy about that.
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.
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.
Evolution never looks to the future.
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.
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
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.
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.
I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.
I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
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?
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.
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.
I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.
I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.
People say I'm shrill and strident.
Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.
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.
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.
I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.
Segregation has no place in the education system.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
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.
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.
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.
We are a very, very unusual species.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.
How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
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.
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.
At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.
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.
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.
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.
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Natural selection is anything but random.
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
