It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.