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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.

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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Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.
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.
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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Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.
Richard Dawkins
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Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.
Richard Dawkins
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Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
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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St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.
Richard Dawkins
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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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Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.
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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Public sharing is an important part of science.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.
Richard Dawkins
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The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.
Richard Dawkins
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[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
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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Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.
Richard Dawkins