There are, on the other hand, good reasons to go back to scripture as literature, because, as I also said in The God Delusion, our whole culture is so bound up with it that you can’t take your allusions or understand your history if you are biblically illiterate. Indeed, I filled two pages with close-packed biblical quotations, phrases familiar to

It is by the standards of a civilized twenty-first-century conversation that we cherry-pick the Bible and decide that this verse is bad but that one good. And since we evidently have preferred and agreed standards for cherry-picking, why bother to go to the Bible at all, if we seek moral guidance? Why not go straight to our moral Zeitgeist and cut

Another of my ten difficult choices concerned the perceived need to provide ‘balance’, something that especially afflicts the BBC because of its charter. I quoted a favourite maxim, which I think I first heard from Alan Grafen: ‘When two opposing points of view are advocated with equal vigour, the truth doesn’t necessarily lie halfway between. It’s

It is truly astonishing that his main objection to my lecturing on evolution was that I held ‘views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’. What does Rep. Thomsen think a university is for?

Steven Weinberg’s much-quoted dictum: ‘With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.’

Organisms, especially animals (plants less so), are coherent, unified bodies that either survive as a whole or die as a whole. And when an animal dies, all its replicators die with it, except those that have previously been handed on to another organism in the process of reproduction. Do you begin to see how apt the word ‘vehicle’ is? And ‘throwawa

The simpler you make your god, the less qualified he is to explain the complexity of the world. And the more complex you make him, the more does he require an explanation in his own right.

Darwinian evolution uniquely solves the problem of life’s statistical improbability, because it works cumulatively and gradually. It really does broker a legitimate traverse from primordial simplicity to eventual complexity – and it is the only known theory capable of doing so. Human engineers can make complex things by design, but the whole point

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s ju