Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Sugerir que la primera causa, la gran desconocida que es responsable de que exista algo en vez de nada, es un ser capaz de diseñar el universo y de hablar a millones de personas simultáneamente, es una abdicación total de la responsabilidad de encontrar una explicación. Es una espantosa exhibición de confianza en un gancho celestial, llena de autoindulgencia y negación del pensamiento.

The other idea is that wherever there are 'shared' genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative

When asked wether I am an atheist, I find it an amusing strategy to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further

No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

The universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. Bad things happen because things happen.

That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

evolutionarily stable strategy, an idea that he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur. A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioural policy. An example of a strategy is: 'Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him; if he retaliates run away.

If the parasite's means of genetic exit from the host's body is the same as the host's, namely the host's gametes or spores, there will be relatively little conflict between the 'interests' of parasite and host genes.

Religion, is a mistake of geography. If you where born in America you are Christan, if you where born in the middle east you are Muslim, China Buddha, and before that Zeus, Thor, and people believed that the earth was flat and the sun went around the earth, though they where wrong & not only that but all of these things have no evidence.

If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

The deist God is a physicist to end all physics, the alpha and omega of mathematicians, the apotheosis of designers; a hyper-engineer who set up the laws and constants of the universe, fine-tuned them with exquisite precision and foreknowledge, detonated what we would now call the hot big bang, retired and was never heard from again.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice.

science cannot even make probability judgements on

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. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.

He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements.

we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

There is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.

Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.

You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.