When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it conveni...
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.
There is no reason to regard God as immune fromconsideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there iscertainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neitherproved nor disproved,...
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 tha...
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.
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...
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
If you don't understand how somethingworks, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don'tknow how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understandhow memories are laid down in the brain? E...
If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.
I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.
I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion...
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...
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.
Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fund...
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...
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
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.
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.