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The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'.

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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Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.
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Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes.
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I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
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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.
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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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Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
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I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
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The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
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Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.
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Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?
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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.
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Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
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Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
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In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
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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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There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.
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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!
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Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
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There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.
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The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
Richard Dawkins