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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.

Richard Dawkins

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

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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
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If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a Marxist child or an Anarchist child or a Post-modernist child. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that.
Richard Dawkins
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Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
Richard Dawkins
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins
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The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
Richard Dawkins
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If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!
Richard Dawkins
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What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.
Richard Dawkins
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Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
Richard Dawkins
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...I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented.
Richard Dawkins
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Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
Richard Dawkins
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My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.
Richard Dawkins
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It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as do as you would be done by.
Richard Dawkins
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You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
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I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
Richard Dawkins
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We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins