I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

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.

God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn't probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.

I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

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?

The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible - not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality.