Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

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

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?