Real science can be hard but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle.
The moral vacuum we now feel ourselves to be in has always been there, even if we havenβt recognized it Religious people are already entirely accustomed to picking and choosing which texts from holy book they obey and which they reject. There are passages of the Judeo-Christian Bible which no modern Christian or Jew would wish to follow. The story of Isaacβs narrowly averted sacrifice by his father Abraham strikes us moderns as a shocking piece of child abuse, whether we read it literally or symbolically.
It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.
An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine.
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
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.
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.
Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist.
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.
