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Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.

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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Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
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Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.
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The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
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[Jay] Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life.
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Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
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All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
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I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.
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I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.
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If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.
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It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as do as you would be done by.
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The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
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I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.
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I think Douglas [Adams] is writing with an eye to irony for adults at the same time as entertaining children.
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If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.
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Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
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The less you think, the more you believe.
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It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
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St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.
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