What matters is not what you think but how you think. ...and all the discoveries that have been made and all the enlightenment that has come to us has come from science and the philosophical method, and not from a priori assumptions of faith or the belief that wisdom comes from revelation. ...Now we know what the church used to [say] was impossible, which is that we are a primate species produced by evolution, on an earth where 99.9% of all species that have... ever appeared have already become extinct.
And a good number of religious will now accept that, but it took them a while. And you can see the process by which they try and explain things away and then try and take credit for them. At first it was argued that God put the fossil bones in the earth so people’s faith could be tested. Nice try; didn’t last long. Then the various attempts that go on to still try and ban the good news of evolution.
…And then now many …christian authorities, and some Jewish ones too, say, ‘no-no-no of course it did all happen and it’s amazing to look at the evidence and the extraordinary scope and variety and even beauty of it. In fact, come to think of it, it proves that God must have been even cleverer than we thought. ‘ Now you’ll notice that there something completely useless about this arguement. It doesn’t it cannot teach you anything. And it cannot be falsified. And an argument that supposedly explains everything, invariably explains nothing at all.
…and he follows by making another good point with a story, an example of the discoverer of the Big Bang talking with the Pope… (at around 3:08 minutes) — give it a listen.