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I think that [Jay] Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf.

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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Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
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My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
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Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
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I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
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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.
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There are very interesting controversies within evolution however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.
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I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education.
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Thus the creationist's favourite question What is the use of half an eye? Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
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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.
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Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
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The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.
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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
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We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.
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We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
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Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.
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It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
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What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
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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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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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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