Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.

From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.

There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

I think that [Paul] Bloom's approach - and others who take it - is not so much that there is a precise genetic basis to faith. But there is a genetic basis to a psychological predisposition that manifests itself as faith and religion under the right conditions.