Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic.

The idea of separating church and state by the Founding Fathers of America was freedom from the domination of one form of religion, because many of them left England, because they were persecuted by the church, because they want to express their Christian faith in a different way. So it was a bit of warfare between Christians.

Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.

I usually have a very clear idea of where I want a song to go, sometimes very specific notes, but I'm generally open to suggestions.

People feel that the Bible is unequivocal in stating that the age of the earth is very young and so on and so forth, and so the big things get lumped together with the lesser things. And the age of the earth is for example virtually made a touchstone of doctrine, when there's so much evidence out there in science against it.

Nonsense is nonsense even when spoken by world-famous scientists.

The new atheism as an old atheism, except it's much more aggressive. The new atheism wants to destroy religion. That's a very different thing. The arguments are not new, it's the aggression that's new.