Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.

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 am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like - humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic.

In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.