For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions...
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.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?
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...
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.
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 bei...
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...
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Yo...
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
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 b...
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
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.
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 car...
However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, orcomplain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn'tthis be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who wil...
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.
All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the univers...
The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals.
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.