Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths. Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? ... A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?

Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind