The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

Occam's razor suggests that, if some event is physically plausible, we don't need recourse to more extraordinary claims for its being. Surely the requirement of an all-powerful deity who somehow exists outside of our universe, or multiverse, while at the same time governing what goes on inside it, is one such claim. It should thus be a claim of last, rather than first, resort.

Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.

Most people don't base their morality on religion in spite what they say. If you ask people, "If you didn't believe in God, would you go out and kill your neighbour?" Most people will say, "No".

If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.