I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us [...] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, [...] then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith, I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.

I think that [Paul] Bloom's approach - and others who take it - is not so much that there is a precise genetic basis to faith. But there is a genetic basis to a psychological predisposition that manifests itself as faith and religion under the right conditions.

Faith is the lack of evidence, and it shouldn't be that difficult to convince people that the right reason to believe something is that there is evidence for it. People do not innately go for this view, but nevertheless it is not that difficult to teach.

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.