What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.

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

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.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

The logical conclusion to a compassionate and respectful relationship to sentient animals is that we stop eating them.

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!

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

God is an idea that people believe in and I spend time arguing with people that subscribe to that idea(man made idea).

The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.

Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.

Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

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.

I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

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 hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

I hate the neologism "owned" for "scored a victory over". I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.

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