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
taken dying should
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
believe taken thinking
I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns.
taken islamic sacrifice
Theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Issac should not be taken as literal fact, and the appropriate response is two-fold. First, many, many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Secondly, how should we take the story? As an alagory? Then an alagory for what? Surely nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? Then what kind of lesson could be derived from this appalling story?
conversation sure
I'm not sure this conversation can go any further.
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
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.
mean writing simple
Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something therefore religion can.'
dangerous
Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
prayer believe mean
Religion and science have nothing to do with each other, they're about different things, science is about the way the world works and religion is about miracles, I mean, if you ask most ordinary people in church or in a mosque why they believe, it's almost certainly got something to do with the belief that God does wonderful things, that God intervenes, that God heals the sick, that God answers prayers, God forgives sins.
believe survival favors
I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.
thinking people forever
We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
certain unlikely shows
You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
animal thinking whales
Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals.