What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.
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?
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
Islands are natural workshops of evolution.
I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.
It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.
To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.
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.