I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and th…
Author
Richard Dawkins
54 quotations
About Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, noted atheist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1995 he was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position he held until 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards, among them the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Presenting the latter, Paul Nurse …
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Richard DawkinsIf 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 athei…
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate …
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.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to …
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I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
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.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experie…
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.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate …
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
I love romantic poetry.
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?
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.
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.
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…
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.