We who cherish science should be careful to distinguish when we are doing science and when we are extrapolating from it.

The evolution debate has exposed a fundamental divide in our society,

Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, [ethics] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint - ...and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it - the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution today.

...I really want to believe. I find the goodies offered by Christianity extremely attractive. But I am damned (again!) if I am going to sell my evolutionary birthright for a mess of religious pottage.

Their [the new atheists] treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing.

We who cherish science should be careful to distinguish when we are doing science and when we are extrapolating from it

In particular, I argue that in both evolution and creation we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith-rival stories of origins, rival judgments about he meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies-pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind.

The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.