Quote

The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

Richard Dawkins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Anything
Trying
Postulates
Hypothesis
Worthwhile
Explanation
Explain
Offers
Simply

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
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.
Richard Dawkins
Image
All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.
Richard Dawkins
Image
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
Richard Dawkins
Image
...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
Image
I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
Richard Dawkins
Image
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
Richard Dawkins
Image
You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).
Richard Dawkins
Image
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
Richard Dawkins