Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

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.

It's a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe - capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process - that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn't think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death.

Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.

There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.