Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

First a piece of Irish wisdom: you should always listen to a bookie. For they have a saying, 'Money tells a good story,' and somewhere in their odds is a kind of science-fiction existentialism that decrees that we, the people, know everything. In other words, betting patterns often make for good, unconscious soothsaying.

Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn't mean that they didn't teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

Science will liberate us from the chains of big cities and lead us back to nature.