It's about time we start criticizing faith.

Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.