The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.

We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.