Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.

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!

So, the question is: If greenflies and elm trees don't do it, why do the rest of us go to such lengths to mix our genes up with somebody else's before we make a baby? It does seem an odd way to proceed. Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?*

Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

our species, with its unique gift of foresight – product of the simulated virtual-reality we call the human imagination

Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects.

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice towards religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement.

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

In terms of the analogy, suppose an ideally balanced crew would consist of four right-handers and four left-handers. Once again assume that the coach, unaware of this fact, selects blindly on 'merit'. Now if the pool of candidates happens to be dominated by right-handers, any individual left-hander will tend to be at an advantage: he is likely to cause any boat in which he finds himself to win, and he will therefore appear to be a good oarsman.

There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman. VICTOR HUGO

According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.

That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child.

There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of 'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions.

You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you.

what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers?

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.

A gene is not indivisible, but it is seldom divided. It is either definitely present or definitely absent in the body of any given individual. A gene travels intact from grandparent to grandchild, passing straight through the intermediate generation without being merged with other genes. If genes continually blended with each other, natural selection as we now understand it would be impossible.

Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature.We can do it.Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons pf short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.