I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

You shouldn't be afraid of science. Accepting the reality of nature makes life more exciting and even more precious.

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.