Quotes About Science

If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.

how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.

If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism.

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

suspect that neither the Cambridge nor the Oxford astronomer really believed that theologians have any expertise that enables them to answer questions that are too deep for science.

light from different stars produces 'rainbows' that are different in very particular ways, and this can tell us a lot about the stars.

Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection

Sodium light (produced by an electric arc in sodium vapour) glows yellow.

A scientific theorum has not been - cannot be - proved in the way a mathematical theorem is proved.

every element has its own unique 'atomic number', which is the number of protons in its nucleus (and also the number of electrons orbiting

Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as 'intelligent design theory

I define a replicator as anything in the universe of which copies are made.

This is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religious book. I have done that, it's another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again

Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God.

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.

To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in

Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?

He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

the God of the Gaps' strategy condemned by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else.