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My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.
Richard Dawkins
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...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.
Richard Dawkins
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If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
Richard Dawkins
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I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than [Richard Dawkins]. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.
Richard Dawkins
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I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
Richard Dawkins
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It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
Richard Dawkins
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Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.
Richard Dawkins
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Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
Richard Dawkins
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Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Richard Dawkins
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Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
Richard Dawkins
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People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable.
Richard Dawkins
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If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
Richard Dawkins
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I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
Richard Dawkins
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It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
Richard Dawkins
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I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.
Richard Dawkins
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If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.
Richard Dawkins
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Pope Francis seems to be a much nicer man than Pope Benedict, but I'm not sure that his views on things that really matter are all that different. Whereas Benedict was perhaps a wolf in wolf's clothing, Francis is perhaps a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Richard Dawkins
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Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn't probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.
Richard Dawkins
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Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins