I would also say that I've been driven to my religious beliefs such as it is by necessity, not by desire. What do you want to have on your side when you're contending with the unknowable future and its vagaries? How about truth? How about beauty? How about justice? You want allies? Those are powerful allies. That's what the university supposed to be teaching young people. It's like, you need some allies, man.

There's not only more to you than you know; there's more to you than you can imagine. You have an ethical responsibility to act in that light.

I think people act out what they believe. And so, when people ask me if I believe in God, I say, generally, that I act as if God exists, or I try to act as if God exists.

You need to also be terrified of Hell. You think, 'Well, there's no such thing.' It's like, just because you haven't been there doesn't mean there's no such thing. You have to be pretty bloody naive to think there's no such thing.

I believe that we see the world through a narrative framework ... The mechanisms that we use to prioritize our attention are stories, and that means that the people who criticize our stories actually have way more power than you think, because they're actually criticizing the mechanism through which we look at the world.

I don't think science is possible outside of an encompassing Judeo-Christian ethic. So, for example, I don't think you can be a scientist without believing, as an axiom of faith, that truth will set you free or... will set us free.

The hard question for consciousness researchers is why is there consciousness? ... I don't think that is the hard question; I think the hard question is what's the relationship between consciousness and being itself?

I don't think free speech is a right among other rights ... I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought—and it has to be free, because if it's not free, it's not thought.

Well, Dostoevsky's comment on that was, if there's no God, everything is permitted ... And I think it's true ... If you believe nothing, you'll fall for anything.

Start with what you have under control in your own life, because where else you going to start? You look to yourself; put your house in order; don't be worried about some other person walking the satanic path.

Redemption's an individual matter. And so my hope is that if enough people take themselves with enough seriousness, then we won't end up in Hell—because we certainly could; it's a high probability.

There's no bloody way I'm writing a diversity, inclusivity, and equity statement for a grant ... I can't imagine the circumstances under which I would do that.

One way of conceptualizing the layers of literary depth is that the deeper an idea is, the more other ideas depend on it. And so you have fundamental ideas that are fundamental, because if you shake that idea, you shake all the ideas that are dependent on them. And then I would say, well, the realm of the divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas.