If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs.

I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.

To invoke the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing - for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.