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The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
Author
Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Geneticist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Screenwriter
Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
CR Dawkins
R. Dawkins
Purpose
Everything
Teleology
Assignment
Many
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Children
Native
Never
Grow
Grows
Called

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The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
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I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
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I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.
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Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
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In the beginning was simplicity.
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bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.
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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
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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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Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.
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I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.
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I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
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I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.
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The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues
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You can't blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, 'This is an exceedingly powerful tool.' And you want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.
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Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil.
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I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.
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A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
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The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.
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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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