I was born into a Zoroastrian family; I stopped believing roughly around the age of eight. ibid. Professor Mahzarin Banaji
By adding unchanging in order to keep omnipotence that’s going to conflict with active in the world. ibid. Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
When you talk about decent scientists today who are religious ask them very carefully precisely what it is they believe. ibid. Professor Richard Dawkins
This assumption that the mind is separate from the body ... underpins notions of the afterlife. ibid. Professor Bruce Hood
Religion is wonderful ways to save a person’s time. ibid. Professor Marvin Minsky
A fierce battle between Science and Religion. ibid. Professor Herman Philipse
The afterlife ... There’s no proof it exists. ibid. Michio Kaku
The culture of religion ... is so huge. ibid. Professor Dame Caroline Humphrey
It’s not like we invented the cube. ibid. Professor Max Tegmark
I’m a rational humanist. ibid. Professor David Parkin
Jesus – it’s a matter of indifference. ibid. Professor Robert Price
If there were creator gods the world would be different. ibid. Professor Jonathan Haidt
I don’t think we should upset those people who do. ibid. Professor Max Perutz
There is no possible way of discerning his existence. ibid. Professor Rodolfo Llinas
I’ve never been religious. ibid. Professor Dan McKenzie
There is no non-physical mind or soul. ibid. Professor Patricia Churchland
Once they invented Newtonian mechanics, arguments for the existence of God shifted their focus. ibid. Professor Sean Carroll
A personal God – and that I don’t believe. ibid. Professor Alexander Vilenkin
The question does God exist is nonsense ... Wishful thinking. ibid. Professor P Z Myers
I decided then as a thinking child that religion was not good for one. ibid. Professor Haroon Ahmed
Deism morphed into atheism. ibid. Professor David Sloan Wilson
The Bible is the most ... misunderstood book in the history of civilisation ... If He meant to give us His very words, why didn’t He make sure we received them? ibid. Professor Bart Ehrman
We’ve gotten a much better grasp at the way the universe is put together. ibid. Professor Seth Lloyd
Entirely atheist and always have been. ibid. Professor Dan Brown
People who say that Science has nothing to say about God are just wrong. ibid. Professor Victor Stenger
Maintaining the culture is maintaining the faith. ibid. Professor Simon Schaffer
I’m not sure that it nails the case of is there a purpose that’s written in the universe. ibid. Professor Saul Perlmutter
That’s a lot of what religion’s about – witchdoctors. ibid. Professor Lee Silver
I’m not a religious or orthodox Jew. ibid. Professor Barry Supple
A being you don’t understand or know – what will that lead you to? ibid. Professor Alan Dershowitz
Drugs that produce religious experiences. ibid. Professor John Raymond Smythies
I can’t identify with any of it myself. ibid. Professor Chris Hann
Religion has been on the retreat in those areas of overlap. ibid. Professor David Gross
To have conviction is very different from having faith. ibid. Professor Ronald de Sousa
When we got to England he was a Christian and I was an atheist. ibid. Professor Robert Hinde
We as astronomers confront the big questions of wonder every day. ibid. Professor Carolyn Porco
There is a sense in which the road to atheism is paved not with science but with religious intentions. Jonathan Miller
This series is about the disappearance of something: religious faith. It’s the story of what is often referred to as atheism. The history of the growing conviction that God doesn’t exist. Jonathan Miller: A Rough History of Disbelief I: Shadows of Doubt ***** BBC 2004
9/11: It’s inconceivable that it could have been done without religion. For it’s only in the name of some sort of absolute assurance of a permanent life after death that someone would be willing to undertake such an act. ibid.
The spectacle of September 11th is a forceful reminder of the potentially destructive power of the three great monotheistic religions that have dominated the world in one way or another for nearly two thousand years. ibid.
Atheism itself has acquired almost sectarian connotations. ibid.
Christianity was constantly redesigning its own dogma. ibid.
One can’t be in a state of belief all the time. ibid.
Belief is not a continuously experienced mental state. ibid.
Religious belief became almost inevitably associated with authority and power. ibid.
Two loony notions: Judaism and Christianity. ibid.
God for many of the Anglicans is nothing more than a sort of awkward geriatric relative. ibid.
It would be a very thin form of life that didn’t have these images. ibid.
The Christian imagination was more or less surrounded by an impenetrable cyclorama of sacred imagery. Jonathan Miller: A Rough History of Disbelief II: Noughts and Crosses
Increased worldwide travel ... [and] various forms of Graeco-Roman pagan scepticism and materialism. A sort of Artesian Well. ibid.
Having closed down the philosophical schools in Athens, the newly converted Christian and Roman Empire made strenuous efforts to Christianise some of the earlier pagan philosophies. ibid.
The advent of new science and technology in the Renaissance would also have a role to play. ibid.
Christianity starts to come apart. ibid.
The deists were a largely upper class group, and as the name suggests they certainly did believe in a deity. But they were dissatisfied with the state of Christianity. ibid.
[Baron Paul Henri] d’Holbach was the first to write an unarguably atheist book ... The Baron d’Holbach was the first person since classical times at least to insist without any hesitation that there was no God and no supernatural dimension to the universe. His book The System of Nature became known as the Atheists’ Bible. ibid.
[Thomas] Paine’s sceptical and revolutionary ideas were now taking root in England. Jonathan Miller: A Rough History of Disbelief III: The Final Hour
Darwin’s work would call into question God’s role as creator of Nature. ibid.
By the middle of the nineteenth century there were more than forty secular societies in Britain. ibid.
Why should faith survive? ibid.
He [Sigmund Freud] saw religion as an illusion. ibid.
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners. Dr Jonathan Miller
We are getting tantalisingly close to a comprehensive cognitive neuro-science of religious belief. Andy Thomson, lecture American Atheist Convention 2009, ‘Why We Believe in Gods’
We start with Darwin. Darwin’s remarkable idea not only gives us the only workable explanation we have for the design and variety of all life on Earth, his idea gives us the only workable explanation we have for the design and architecture of the human mind. ibid.
We are risen apes, not fallen angels. ibid.
Religious ideas are a by-product of cognitive mechanisms designed for other purposes, artefact of ability for imagined social worlds, human concepts with alterations. ibid.
We way over-read causality and purpose. ibid.
Children will spontaneously invent the concept of God. ibid.
It’s very hard for us to conceive our own deaths. ibid.