Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.

Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.