Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off.

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it.

If replicators exist that are active, variants of them with certain phenotypic effects tend to out-replicate those with other phenotypic effects. If they are also germ-line replicators, these changes in relative frequency can have long-term, evolutionary impact.

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

The Jesuit boast, 'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man,' is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed.

By the way, it had to happen – a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.35

It is these phenotypic effects that we see as adaptations to survival. When we ask whose survival they are adapted to ensure, the fundamental answer has to be not the group, nor the individual organism, but the relevant replicators themselves.

James Dobson, founder of today's infamous 'Focus on the Family' movement,fn1 is equally acquainted with the principle: 'Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience – what they see, hear, think, and believe – will determine the future course for the nation.'78

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

Replicators need not last forever. They need only last long enough to produce additional replicators [fecundity] that retain their structure largely intact [fidelity]. The relevant longevity concerns the retention of structure through descent. Some entities, though structurally similar, are not copies because they are not related by descent.

We'd be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead

He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival.

Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination.

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc.

the God of the Gaps' strategy condemned by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. What worries scientists is something else.

What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter.

If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable.

The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies. It is not infinitely long-lived. Even a diamond is not literally everlasting, and even a cistron can be cut in two by crossing-over. The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.

Careful inference can be more reliable than 'actual observation', however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.