I learned from the stories they told me about their own childhood that religion had once been a tremendous force in their lives whose influence they had both fought hard to escape.

Deep disappointment is our fate.

Early on, I began to wonder why, if religion is so stupid and cruel, millions of people are taken in by it. How can so many people go so badly wrong? Must those who believe in God check their minds at the church door out of respect for the mysteries within? Is religion always the enemy of enlightenment, as my mother said?

The idea of eternity in this sense gives us the “running room” we need to set goals that are by definition unattainable because they cannot be reached in any period of time, whatever its duration. It makes these goals conceivable. At the same time, it guarantees our disappointment.

Modern science rests on the assumption that the gap between what we know about the world and what we long to know cannot be closed in any number of lifetimes.

It is godless because the presence of an eternal order, natural or supernatural, is no longer so intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life that the existence of this order is as obvious as that of the world itself.

In the broadest sense, the idea of God, in all its variant forms, is the idea of eternity—of someone or something exempt from the whirlwind of time.

he thought of religion as ethics in disguise—a system of perfectly reasonable moral teachings hidden behind an accumulation of absurd superstitions and nonsensical practices that serve no rational purpose at all.

For a scientist, it is never enough merely to know that something is the case. She wants to know why it is the case. Her answers only lead to further questions. The process is endless.