Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSLis an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1941
CityNairobi, Kenya
Richard Dawkins quotes about
religious giving-up children
I think there in a great deal to be said for religious education in the sense of teaching about religion and biblical literacy. Both those things, by the way, I suspect will prepare a child to give up religion. If you are taught comparative religion, you are more likely to realise that there are other religions than the one you have been brought up in. And if you are if you are taught to read the bible, I can think of almost nothing more calculated to turn you off religion.
christian atheist interesting
If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.
believe moving grandparent
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.
beautiful people firsts
Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but ... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it ... I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!
animal space survival
Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.
atheist atheism bother
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
atheism there-is-no-god prove
We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.
believe science years
People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.
believe ignorance people
It is a virtue to admit ignorance when you don't know, but not to wallow in ignorance as an end in itself. People say if we don't believe god is watching over us, we abandon morality. Are they right?
jesus drama reality
In other words Luke's story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah's prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling.
dating long religion
Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.
country religious economic-inequality
It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.
believe simple birth-rate
It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
mistake passion mind
It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.