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Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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Improbable
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Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
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The less you think, the more you believe.
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Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
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There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.
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Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill.
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The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
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Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.
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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.
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Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.
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I hate the neologism owned for scored a victory over. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
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The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
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[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West.
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Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.
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Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
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When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: Thank you. You have changed my life. I am really moved by that.
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Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
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Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
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Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.
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Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
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Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
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