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Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 11

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Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?

Richard Dawkins
Atheist, Powerful, Islands
Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.270, Simon and Schuster

Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

Richard Dawkins
Dna, Archives, Rivals
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.124, W. W. Norton & Company

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

Richard Dawkins
Chance, Theory, Obvious

If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.

Richard Dawkins
Eye, Feelings, Looks

Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Richard Dawkins
Dog, Book, Two

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

Richard Dawkins
Dna, Cells, Firsts
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.119, W. W. Norton & Company

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Differences, Way
Richard Dawkins (2017). “Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist”, p.87, Random House

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

Richard Dawkins
Effort, World, Way

To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God - it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

Richard Dawkins
Ignorant, Needs, Answers
Source: inters.org

[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

Richard Dawkins
Kind, Mercy, Indifferent
Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.

Richard Dawkins
Falling In Love, Love You, Reality

I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.

Richard Dawkins
Education, Business, Believe

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Believe, Islam

There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.

Richard Dawkins
Thinking, Doe, Needs
Source: newrepublic.com

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

Richard Dawkins
Jesus, Departed, Scripture
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.284, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Richard Dawkins
Feelings, Understanding, Atheism

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

Richard Dawkins
Worry, Suffering, Nihilism
Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.392, Simon and Schuster

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

Richard Dawkins
Views, Would Be, Needs
Interview with Sheena McDonald, 1995.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Richard Dawkins
Atheist, Cat, Thinking
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Richard Dawkins
Years, Justice, Mad
Richard Dawkins, Yan Wong (2005). “The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution”, p.613, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.

Richard Dawkins
Simple, Needs, Individual
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

Richard Dawkins
Atheism, Pantheism, Deism
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.

Richard Dawkins
Believe, Silly, People

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?

Richard Dawkins
Science, Thinking, Play

If you are offended by reading views that disagree with yours, then yes, you will be offended. However, it is not gratuitously offensive, it simply puts an argument, and if your views are strong enough, as I believe they are, you will be able to defend your views. You will not say, "Oh, it's offensive, it's offensive." You will say "No, you are wrong here and you are wrong here," and that's what you should do.

Richard Dawkins
Strong, Fear, Believe