Quotes About Richard Dawkins

Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism—for

frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.

To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation.

I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

This talk of laughing all the way to the bank reminds me of a delightful line from Shakespeare: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. 2 Henry VI

The Blind Watchmaker, by the same producer, gave me a new respect for his profession. At their best, Horizon producers (some of their programmes can be seen in America, often repackaged under the name Nova)

Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life's complex design.

Have lucky stars swum into Uranus?

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world championship. Humanitiy needs a lesson in humility.

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

There are so many different faiths. How do you know the holy book you have been brought up with is the true one? And if all the others are wrong, what makes you think your holy book isn't wrong too?

As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase 'And it came to pass', the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet.

This 'shuddering before the beautiful', this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound. S. Chandrashekhar , physicist, cited by Richard Dawkins

Radiation all along the larger spectrum can be unwoven in the same kind of way as the rainbow, although the particular instrument we use for the unweaving—a radio tuner instead of a prism, for instance—is different in different parts of the spectrum.

Premature erection of alleged philosophical problems is sometimes a smokescreen for mischief.

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.

My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

Richard Dawkins' assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why, given atheism, is he mistaken when he says, "There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.… We are machines for propagating DNA.… It is every living object's sole reason for being"?

the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking's argument against God in A Brief History of Time as "the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought."[3] With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins' accession to the throne.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.