Philosophically, I am a logical empiricist and materialist, and I am a veteran of over 400 radio and TV interviews and debates. I am a Christ-myth advocate and am pursuing research into how Christianity could...

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations – that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute...

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting...

What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisingly vulgar expression of an ideological tradition that has,...

Among the things most characteristic of organisms–most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems–is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin’s...

For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a...

I Am PrimateI was once taught, that I am a soul in a body.I once believed I was separate from the earth.A stranger in a strange land,a sinner in need of a Savior.But, isn’t this...

Things that look like they were designed, probably were… If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase...

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality....

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the...

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a...

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity...

I believe in you and me. I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life — in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds,...

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting...

I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to...

The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have...

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been...

Nature has but one plan of operation, invariably the same in the smallest things as well as in the largest, and so often do we see the smallest masses selected for use in Nature, that...

The Hartle-Hawking derivation of the unconditional probability of the existence of a universe of our sort is inconsistent with classical theism. The unconditional probability is very high, near to 1. For purposes of simplification, we...

I suppose the spiritual trance is harder to break than the religious one because the delusion is more difficult to distinguish. You have a quasi-cloud of ideas that include wonderful concepts of openness and altruism...

… on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns...

Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is...

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had...

An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology,...

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work...

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth’s atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth’s external crust, and finally of the origin and development of...

But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the...

Our species is angry on a deep level. We know something has been wrong for a long time. We are tired of being thrown the scraps. This is primal, guttural; the scream of an exhausted...

Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and...

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare...

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks...

copied” idea.

All the work of the crystallographers serves only to demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity … that in nature there is nothing absolute, nothing perfectly regular.

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable,...

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that...

I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France,...

Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God…. On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded...

First LawIn every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional...

I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last bath is out...

Once the wounded child awakens to its human self, a primal scream emerges from the depths of denial like the Kraken released from its underwater prison.

Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to...

To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the...

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: “Deh moon looks like hell, don’t it?

It is suspected, by some, that spiritual beings are extremely jealous of the natural world because they are nothing more than a figment of the imagination. This might explain their compulsive and obsessive behavior in...

Majestatis naturæ by ingenium (Genius equal to the majesty of nature.)[Inscribed ordered by King Louis XV for the base of a statue of Buffon placed at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris.]

There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution.

Modernist discourse […] incorporates semantic devices – such as the labeling of theism as ‘religion’ and naturalism as ‘science’ – that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the...

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride...

The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus...