We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion.

I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

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.

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

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.

We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.