Richard Dawkins Quotes
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There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
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The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
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My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.
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Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
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There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.
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Pope Francis seems to be a much nicer man than Pope Benedict, but I'm not sure that his views on things that really matter are all that different. Whereas Benedict was perhaps a wolf in wolf's clothing, Francis is perhaps a wolf in sheep's clothing.
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The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.
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The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.
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Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
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Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
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In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.
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The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.
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I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
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There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.
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It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.
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We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
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I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that we get our morals from scripture because if we did we'd be stoning people for working on the Sabbath or switching on a light on the Sabbath. So the point is that you can find good bits of the Bible but you have to cherry-pick, you have reject the nasty bits and pick the nice bits.
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I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
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Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.
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If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
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People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven't read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism.
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Have they discovered evolution yet?
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Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
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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.
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Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.
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What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?
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I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.
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Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose
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I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
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The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
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