[MY FAITH] didn’t just drop away. I thought about it a lot and clung to it for a while. I went through a phase of disbelieving in the Jesus part of Christianity while remaining a kind of deist. The last vestige of clinging on disappeared when I was finally convinced that Darwinian evolution was an adequate explanation for the beauty and complexity of life.

RELIGION HAS BECOME accustomed to getting a free ride. If somebody has the temerity to offer even a mild criticism, it automatically sounds strident even if it isn’t.

SCIENTISTS GAIN PRESTIGE from changing their minds, unlike, say, politicians, who get lambasted for flip-flopping. Scientists are thought to be good guys if they change their minds occasionally.

THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD THING [about Darwinian evolution] is that [critics] think it’s a theory of chance. People say, ‘Nothing will convince me that all this beauty and elegance and appearance of design is just an accident.’ Indeed, natural selection is not an accident. That’s the whole point.

IF BACH HAD BEEN brought up in an atheistic culture, he might have produced oratorios just as sublime, but inspired by the universe, by the galaxy, by plate tectonics.

I BELIEVE THAT IF LIFE is ever found on other planets, however strange, weird, and alien it is—and I think it will be very strange, weird, and alien—it will be Darwinian life. It will have evolved by natural selection.

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.