Richard Dawkins
[Dawkins is a prestigious biologist and an atheist. He was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.]
“Science has the humility to recognize that there is an awful lot that we don't understand and that maybe we can't understand.”
Discussing the well verified status of the theory of evolution, Dr. Dawkins said, “the only alternative...is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhand and devious manner.”
“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.”
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”
“An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
["The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also." Mark Twain]
“Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”
“So to the book's provocation, the statement that nearly half the people in the United States don't believe in evolution. Not just any people but powerful people, people who should know better, people with too much influence over educational policy...[T]he fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant...”
“It is often said...that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.”
“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. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!”
“We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”
“The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap?”
“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion...[W]e must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.”
“Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia. What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.”
“We should be offended when children are denied a proper education. We should be offended when children are told they will spend eternity in hell. We should be offended when medical science, for example stem-cell research, is compromised by the bigoted opinions of powerful and above all well-financed ignoramuses. We should be offended when voodoo, of all kinds, is given equal weight to science.”
“We are incredibly social animals...And when somebody does you a good turn, it's important to be grateful. It's important to pay-back the favor and to express your gratitude. And that, I suggest, might generalize. The psychological predisposition to feel grateful when something good happens to you might generalize from feeling grateful when a person does something good for you and when the weather does. Say, when an accident happens -- when there's an earthquake and your child doesn't die, you feel grateful. And, you feel the need to be grateful to something or somebody. And you can't feel grateful to other people because they're not responsible for the weather. So you conjure up a fictitious person to feel grateful to.
“And that's a special case really of the idea that it's good survival practice to suspect agents in nature. A lot of what happens in nature doesn't have an agent deliberately causing it. A lot of it is the weather. A lot of it is the wind. A lot of it is just plane accidents that happen. But, when there are agents around, and where those agents might be lions or leopards or crocodiles, who might be lurking in wait for you, or might be stalking you, then it's important for your survival to attribute agency to things and that may generalize even to places where there is no agency. I have often used the example of a rustling in the long grass which could be the wind -- it's actually most likely to be the wind; but which could be a lion. And, although the odds are that it's the wind, your best bet is probably to assume that it's a lion because if you get the bet wrong... if you bet on it being the wind and your bet is wrong, then that's rather tragic.
“So there may be a psychological predisposition to invent agencies, to invent agents, where there aren't any. And this then, this same psychological predisposition generalizes itself to wind gods, and thunder gods, and lighting gods, and river gods, and sea gods and things like that; which then become merged later on in cultural evolution into the named god like Thor, and Zeus, and Apollo, and Yahweh.”
“I think that religion should be criticized on intellectual grounds as providing a competitor to the scientific explanation of life and the Universe. It's educationally pernicious because it gives the idea that you can evade the responsibility to understand things by postulating some sort of easy explanation. “O God did it.” I think that's educationally pernicious. And, as a scientist and as an educator, I'm most interested in that.”
