Quotes About Dawkins

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.

We don't usually see this happening but, like detectives arriving on the scene after a crime, we can piece together what must have happened from the evidence that remains.

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

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

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.

H. L. Mencken was prophetic when he wrote: 'Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.

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.

Namely, that for every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things (many of which I have quoted) which imply that genes are purposive. And

I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.

In a universe where visible matter accounts for only 0.01 percent of creation, it would be foolish to undertake science without a sense that reality is extremely mysterious. Dark energy exists on the fringe of the unknowable, and so does a saint who exists without eating. The simplistic logic and outmoded science applied by Dawkins and company don't remotely approach how reality works.

There is no gospel of atheism. Atheists don't pray at the altar of a Richard Dawkins poster.

There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.

Because although Dawkins may feel that our mystery has been solved - and although science has indeed solved part of it - most of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. On the contrary we still experience ourselves, as our ancestors did, as tor and contradictory beings, vulnerable to aspects of ourselves and our world that we cannot understand.

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.

Dawkins's result can only be obtained because of the element of intelligent design embedded in the whole experiment.

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins—is talking out of the back of his neck.

I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.