Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God - it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.