Richard Dawkins Quotes about Design

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I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

Richard Dawkins

Design, Waiting, Come Up

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Richard Dawkins

Atheist, Views, Design

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

Richard Dawkins

Design, Religion, Atheism

Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Richard Dawkins

Selfish, Generosity, Design

The Selfish Gene ch. 1 (1976)

The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

Richard Dawkins

Powerful, Design, Demand

Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.

Richard Dawkins

Believe, Successful, Design

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Richard Dawkins

Design, Evolution, Universe

"Thinkers Lay Out the Beliefs They Can't Prove". "Talk of The Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. March 9, 2006.

If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

Selfish, Evil, Design

Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

Richard Dawkins

Design, Vengeance, Vicious

Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.146, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Richard Dawkins

Atheist, Design, Waiting

"The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design". Book by Richard Dawkins, September 28, 2015.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Richard Dawkins

Car, Design, Natural

"The atheist". Interview with Gordy Slack, www.salon.com. April 30, 2005.