Richard Dawkins Quotes
Richard Dawkins walks out on interview because of man’s Islamic faith and then turns to twitter to bemoan about the incident and faith in general:
I left when he said Muhammad rode a winged horse. A non-timewasting journalist needs at least SOME grasp of reality. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2015/12/my-year-islamophobia … —
If you believe you’re Napoleon or a poached egg, you’re in an asylum. If you believe in winged horses you’re a New Statesman journalist. —
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.
It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that). – April 9, 1989
March 2005 photo Christopher G. Street, Bransgore, Dorset, England, UK.
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. – regarding the possibility of supernatural and unexplained. “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” November 12, 1996
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture. – 1996
It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
Well, science is not religion and it doesn’t just come down to faith. Although it has many of religion’s virtues, it has none of its vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
Science is actually one of the most moral, one of the most honest disciplines around — because science would completely collapse if it weren’t for a scrupulous adherence to honesty in the reporting of evidence. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
Don’t fall for the argument that religion and science operate on separate dimensions and are concerned with quite separate sorts of questions. Religions have historically always attempted to answer the questions that properly belong to science. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
It could be argued that, if the idea of an afterlife is an illusion (as I believe it is), the consolation it offers is hollow. But that’s not necessarily so; a false belief can be just as comforting as a true one, provided the believer never discovers its falsity. But if consolation comes that cheap, science can weigh in with other cheap palliatives, such as pain-killing drugs, whose comfort may or may not be illusory, but they do work. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
Perhaps the right tactic is to accept the charge gratefully and demand equal time for science in religious education classes. – regarding reacting to assertions that evolutionary science is also a religion. – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
What worries me is not the question of equal time but that, as far as I can see, children in the United Kingdom and the United States are essentially given no time with evolution yet are taught creationism (whether at school, in church, or at home). – “Is Science A Religion?” published in The Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
The uneducated masses need a God to keep them out of mischief or to comfort them in bereavement. – article “The know-nothings, the know-alls, and the no-contests” in the Nullifidian, December 1994
Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. The worst thing is that the rest of us are supposed to respect it: to treat it with kid gloves. – article “The know-nothings, the know-alls, and the no-contests” in the Nullifidian, December 1994
I will respect your views if you can justify them. but if you justify your views only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not respect them. – article “The know-nothings, the know-alls, and the no-contests” in the Nullifidian, December 1994
If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? – “Emptiness of Theology” in Free Inquiry Magazine
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. Aristotle was a distant cousin to a squid, a closer cousin to a monkey, a closer cousin still to an ape (strictly speaking, Aristotle was an ape, an African ape, a closer cousin to a chimpanzee than a chimp is to an orangutan. – “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” November 12, 1996
Our belief that we share ancestors with chimpanzees, and more distant ancestors with monkeys, will never be superseded although details of timing may change. – “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” November 12, 1996
…there is so much that we don’t yet understand, we should loudly proclaim those things that we do, so as to focus attention on problems that we should be working on. – “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” November 12, 1996
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. – regarding the possibility of supernatural and unexplained. “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” November 12, 1996
The Blind Watchmaker, 1986 (revised) 1996
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “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.” I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. – page 6
Richard Dawkins on with Bill O’Reilly April 24, 2007
Richard Dawkins April 4, 2007
Richard Dawkins answering the “most simplest question” October 23, 2006
RICHARD DAWKINS – THE SELFISH GENE
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
– “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, September 15, 2001
Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. – “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, September 15, 2001
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naïve and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions? – “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, September 15, 2001
Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalizing of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion…. – “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, September 15, 2001
To fill a world with … religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. – “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, September 15, 2001
This is the front book cover art for the book A Devil’s Chaplain by the author(s) Richard Dawkins.
RICHARD DAWKINS – “The Devil’s Chaplain”
My last vestige of “hands off religion” respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the “National Day of Prayer,” when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place. – Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain (2004)
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all.
– Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain (2004)
To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion. – Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain (2004)
Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn’t. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some “alternative” sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as “orthodox” medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The “alternative” label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate. – Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain (2004)
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. – Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain (2004)
