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What is the purpose of the universe? is a silly question.

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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In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
Richard Dawkins
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The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
Richard Dawkins
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It could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small - at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.
Richard Dawkins
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Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
Richard Dawkins
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The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
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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Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
Richard Dawkins
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Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
Richard Dawkins
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When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins
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In the beginning was simplicity.
Richard Dawkins
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Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.
Richard Dawkins
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In Britain you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.
Richard Dawkins
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Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
Richard Dawkins
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Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.
Richard Dawkins
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I've seen [Lalla Ward] episodes of Doctor Who. They're good, at least partly because the scripts were written by Douglas Adams.
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What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day.
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I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
Richard Dawkins
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Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.
Richard Dawkins