Quotes from Richard Dawkins

There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase 'non-overlapping magisteria':

Anybody can grow a bone in the penis; you don't have to be particularly healthy or tough.

We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design. Each species is well fitted to its particular way of life.

The faithful are encouraged to profess belief, whether they are convinced by it or not. Maybe if you repeat something often enough, you will succeed in convincing yourself of its truth.

Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.

Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television.

The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to be have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?

The point is the obvious one that selection at any one locus is not independent of selection at other loci.

Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in equally engaging verse:   Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?

Just think what the ordeal must be like for less intellectually robust people, less equipped by education and rhetorical skill than they are, or than Julia Sweeney is, to argue their corner in the face of obdurate family members.

If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs.

David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory

Not only do we live in a universe that is capable of producing life. Successive generations of universes progressively evolve to become increasingly the sort of universe that, as a by-product, is capable of producing life.

The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one.

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes.

but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don't realize that non-belief is even an option.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet

We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.

There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstantiation, incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don't even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.

A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.

Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.