"Darwin and his intellectual descendants have provided us with fundamental insight into the nature of the world we live in and of our place within it, a contribution to our basic metaphysics. It is still widely supposed that this is the sort of thing that should come from philosophers or even theologians. In this case, at any rate, the insight has come from biology and I, as a philosopher, am happy just to do my best to interpret it. The theologians, I have suggested, can be less complacent about this insight, and may even need to retrain for a discipline with a subject matter with stronger claims to existence."

“Faith is, I suppose, a rough synonym for belief, with an additional connotation that this belief is not grounded on anything. This is a difficult concept to take seriously from a philosophical point of view. Obviously if one has it, one finds it convincing. If one doesn’t, it’s hard to know how to understand the conviction, since no reasons can be offered for it. The difficulty is exacerbated by the variety of objects of faith that are on offer. How does one decide whether to be more impressed by the convinced Christian or the convinced Muslim? Or, for that matter, the person equally convinced of the healing powers of crystals or that faith can move mountains? If there are no reasons for adopting these systems of belief, it seem impossible for there to be any reason for choosing between them. My own response is, I hardly need say, not to take very seriously. It is one thing to admit that our knowledge of the universe is extremely limited, but a counsel of despair to respond to this by believing whatever we feel like.”

“One commonly held ideal of a possible good life is one spent in adoration of or service to the Supreme Being. It is hard to believe that the value of such a life is independent of whether there is, in fact, any such being to adore or serve. In sum, how we should live is a question that cannot be wholly separated from facts about how things are.”

“The limits of a creature’s consciousness are closely related to its particular set of capacities. As I shall elaborate in a moment, language provides us with an extraordinarily enhanced set of capacities, and consequently with an equally enhanced realm of consciousness. Perhaps this should be seen as a case in which a difference of degree amounts to a difference of kind. But if so, it is crucial to remember, from the point of view of evolution, that a difference in kind can be the summation of many small differences of degree.”

“The main point, which would perhaps be unnecessary to labour if it were not so controversial and if it had not been denied in important respects by some quite unlikely people, is that the theory of evolution has been a major, even decisive, contributor to the process of undermining prescientific supernaturalistic metaphysical views and replacing them with the naturalistic metaphysics assumed by most contemporary philosophers. The question is not whether evolution and a particular religious tradition are logically consistent. Provided the religious tradition avoids factual claims, as Gould’s conception of distinct magisteria forces them to do by fiat and as sensible theologians have been increasingly willing to do for centuries, they are consistent because they do not speak on the same subjects. But it is nevertheless the case that science and religion speak for radically different conceptions of the universe. And as the conception fostered by the former has become more compelling, so that promoted by the latter has become less tenable. Science does not contradict religion; but it makes it increasingly improbable that religious discourse has any subject matter.”

“I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problematic to offer as a sufficient reason for belief the suggestion that one would be better off believing it. This is generally described as wishful thinking.”

“Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true.”