Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence.

Debating is not an honest intellectual exercise. It's like a trial in which the goal is not to get to the truth but to win.

In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god.

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

Any strategy that attempts to reinforce faith by undermining science is also doomed to failure. Showing that some scientific theory is wrong will not prove that the religious alternative is correct by default. When the sun was shown not to be the center of the universe, as Copernicus had proposed, the Earth was not moved back to that singular position in the cosmos. If Darwinian evolution is proved wrong, biologists will not develop a new theory based on the hypothesis that each species was created separately by God 6,000years ago.