Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can fvck off.

Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.

I have never quite understood - and this is no doubt my failing - I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition.

The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues

Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now [Francis] Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.