Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.

...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

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.