To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.