Quotes About Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

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

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.

From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.

I'm a closeted nerd. I studied Richard Dawkins. I watched every lecture. He's sort of the leading scientific atheist of our time. He's very provocative. His whole thing is science over spirituality.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

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.

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Nature is not cruel, pitilessly, indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous -- indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...

This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.