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Brian Cox gillar inte att kallas ateist, "att definiera mig i termer av saker jag inte tror på skulle kräva en oändlig lista av substantiv". Han ser inte heller att det finns en nödvändig motsättning mellan religion och vetenskap.

As someone who thinks about religion very little — I reject the label atheist because defining me in terms of the things I don’t believe would require an infinite list of nouns — I see no necessary contradiction between religion and science. By which I mean that if I were a deist, I would claim no better example of the skill and ingenuity of The Creator than in the laws of nature that allowed for the magnificent story of the origin and evolution of life on Earth, and their overwhelmingly beautiful expression in our tree of life. I am not a deist, philosopher or theologian, so I will make no further comment on the origin of the laws of nature that permitted life to evolve. I simply don’t know; perhaps someday we will find out. But be in no doubt that laws they are, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is as precise and well tested as Einstein’s theories of relativity. - Brian Cox

Citatet är ur Cox bok Wonders of Life, vilken är en spinn-off på BBC tv-serien med samma namn. En serie om hur några grundläggande naturlagar skapade förutsättningar för liv. Mer om boken finns att läsa på bloggen Brain Pickings, var ifrån citatet kopierats.

Wonders of Life - Episode 1