Zitat des Tages von Richard Dawkins:
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Segregation has no place in the education system.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.
If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'
Placebos work.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Islands are natural workshops of evolution.
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.
The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.