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
needs might helping
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
differences people needs
Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference)
needs use records
We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
giving intuition needs
And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.
views would-be needs
Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.
needs strange helping
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
news stories needs
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.
doubt needs doe
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.
simple needs individual
A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.
strong doubt needs
The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence … The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation.
luck needs thousand
... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
thoughtful matter born
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
rip successful catholic
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
academic difficulty fill intrinsic law simplicity states subject vacuum
Dawkins Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity