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

It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the afterlife.

People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

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.

The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.