What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

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.

Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer.