Quote

There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.

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
Living
Organisms
Way
Frankly
Sincere
Related
Inconsistent
Believer
Genesis
Age
Interpret
Knowledge
Believers
Universe
Literal

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
Richard Dawkins
Image
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.
Richard Dawkins
Image
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins
Image
We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Public sharing is an important part of science.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.
Richard Dawkins
Image
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
Richard Dawkins
Image
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing I find the reality thrilling.
Richard Dawkins
Image
When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.
Richard Dawkins