It can be consoling to think your children are in heaven. You have got to understand that that doesn't make it true. Many people cannot understand that distinction.

Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.