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I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
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Biologist
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Evolutionary Biologist
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Kenya's capital
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Clinton Dawkins
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Islamic
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Especially
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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[Creationists have] lost in the courts of law they've long ago lost in the halls of science and they continue to lose with every new piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left.
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It is important not to confuse race and religion.
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When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
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Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
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Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?
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We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.
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If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.
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Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.
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The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
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It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
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I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.
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The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance.
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I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.
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If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
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Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
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Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
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The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
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... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
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If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
Richard Dawkins