Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism.

We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.

You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.