Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

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.

For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

We live at a very special time . . . the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: you are all stardust.