Backfire...

It is true that scientists have sometimes been religious, or at any rate superstitious. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, was a spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind. Fred Hoyle, an ex-agnostic who became infatuated with the idea of "design," was the Cambridge astronomer who coined the term "big bang." (He came up with that silly phrase, incidentally, as an attempt to discredit what is now the accepted theory of the origins of the universe. This was one of those lampoons that, so to speak, backfired, since like "Tory" and "impressionist" and "suffragette" it became adopted by those at whom it was directed.)

Um dos trechos interessantíssimos do instigante, eruditíssimo e muito bem humorado "God is not great", de Christopher Hitchens.