It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.

Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic

Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.