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Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 19

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It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Richard Dawkins
Thinking, Mad Cow Disease, Evil
"Is Science a Religion?". Humanist, www.skeptical-science.com. January/February 1997.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Richard Dawkins
Looks, Evolution, Looking To The Future
"The atheist". Interview with Gordy Slack, www.salon.com. April 30, 2005.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response!

Richard Dawkins
Men, Emotional, Self
"Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder". www.edge.org. December 21, 1996.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

Richard Dawkins
Lying, Doctors, Patient

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

Richard Dawkins
Track, Doe, Changing Environment
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.174, W. W. Norton & Company

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Wildlife, Vices

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Richard Dawkins
Understanding, Way, Sometimes

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins
Selfish, Rebel, Earth
Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.221, Oxford University Press

If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.

Richard Dawkins
Healing, Medicine, Technique
Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

Richard Dawkins
Believe, Writing, Self
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.46, W. W. Norton & Company

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

Richard Dawkins
Messages, Exposed, Havens
"Richard Dawkins: Beyond belief". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. January 9, 2006.

Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.

Richard Dawkins
Order, Brain, Size

What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves. It's something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin would have loved it, I'm absolutely sure.

Richard Dawkins
Technology, Understanding, Mind
"Life: A gene-centric view". Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich, www.edge.org. January 23, 2008.

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

Richard Dawkins
Adults, Evolution, Program
Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.314, Simon and Schuster

Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

Richard Dawkins
Creativity, Space, Procedures
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.74, W. W. Norton & Company

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

Richard Dawkins
Beautiful, Atheist, Believe
Richard Dawkins (2000). “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Believe, People
"Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". Interview with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.

Richard Dawkins
Spirit, Glory, Demeaning
"Prince courts controversy as he places the nature of God above the god of science" by James Meek, www.theguardian.com. May 16, 2000.

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

Richard Dawkins
Jobs, Offering, Engineering
"The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers

Richard Dawkins
Suicide, Religious, Long
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.345, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.

Richard Dawkins
Winning, Ridiculous, Argument
"The Flying Spaghetti Monster". Interview with Steve Paulson, www.salon.com. October 13, 2006.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer.

Richard Dawkins
Believe, Intelligent, Alternatives

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

Richard Dawkins
Suicide, Children, Thinking

The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

Richard Dawkins
Meaningful, Views, Adults

There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write-words.

Richard Dawkins
Teacher, Truth, Writing