Page numbers in the following refer to the paperback edition of “The God Delusion”, published by Black Swan. As usual, these quotations are of interest to me for various reasons, and not necessarily because I agree with them. I hope to write here about my point of view in the future.
Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
p. 40
It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth *is* a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow?
p. 80
We can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does [Stephen Jay] Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? [...] If we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
p. 81
[The principle of NOMA, for Non-Overlapping MAgisteria, which suggests that science and religion deal with fundamentally different questions] is popular only because there is no evidence to favour the God Hypothesis. The moment there was the smallest suggestion of any evidence in favour of religious belief, religious apologists would lose no time in throwing NOMA out of the window.
p. 83
Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humour them but don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.
p. 113
Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe [a type of intricate flower] (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe.
p. 146
Predators seem beautifully ‘designed’ to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully ‘designed’ to escape them. Whose side is God on?
p. 161
Lucky chance could never be enough to explain the lush diversity of living complexity on Earth in the same way as we used it to explain the existence of life here in the first place.
p. 167
[According to one theory,] the laws and constants of any one universe, such as our observable universe, are by-laws. The multiverse as a whole [consisting of many universes] has a plethora of alternative sets of by-laws. The anthropic principle [essentially, that the conditions must have existed for life to start because it did] kicks in to explain that we have to be in one of those universes (presumably a minority) whose by-laws happened to be propitious to our eventual evolution.
pp. 173-174
The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain.
pp. 175-176
Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a ‘god centre’ [in the brain] survive to have more grandchildren than rivals who didn't?
p. 197
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
p. 210
Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not.
p. 294
One of the fiercest penalties in the Old Testament is the one exacted for blasphemy. It is still in force in certain countries.
p. 324
Even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.
p. 342
If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to ‘respect’ it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center.
p. 346
[The] tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the source of squirming internal conflict in the minds of nice liberal people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to respect other cultures no less than their own.
p. 369
[One Christmas], the Independent [newspaper] was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.¶ Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label four-year-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed as follows: ‘Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.’ Wouldn't this be a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be.
pp. 379-380
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone to sue.
pp. 403-404