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Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large the mundane world of the familiar.

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
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I hate the neologism owned for scored a victory over. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
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We are a very, very unusual species.
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The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.
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Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
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I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
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Evolution never looks to the future.
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If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.
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Evolution is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life - a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you think about it, before Darwin, we hadn't the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It's still such an exciting idea that it is well worth everybody understanding it.
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Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
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Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.
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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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You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
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The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
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Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
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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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The so-called sophisticated theologians, especially ones who are very nice, like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks, you sometimes don't quite know where you are with them. You feel that when you attack them, you're attacking a wet sponge.
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The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence … The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation.
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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
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However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?
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