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Dawkins Quotes

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Dawkins Quotes

“Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy.”

FaithEvilReligiousChristianityBlindBiblicalPaulApostle PaulRichard DawkinsDawkins
Author:John Lennox
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“Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.”

LoveReasonTruthBeliefFearResponsibilityAtheismCrimeHealthMoralityEthicsEvidenceGuiltAtheistIntellectMythDebateRedemptionIndifferenceDictatorshipTotalitarianismHomo SapiensWishful ThinkingCompulsorySupreme BeingLove Your NeighborAtheist ArgumentRichard DawkinsDawkinsHuman SacrificeEternal PunishmentEternal FatherChristopher HitchensHitchensAncient MythChristianity Is ImmoralDivine DictatorshipGreat Atheist ArgumentHitchslapImmoral Christianity
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.”

ReasonReligionKnowledgeAtheismClarityIndoctrinationAtheistsNew AtheismMental ClarityRichard DawkinsDawkinsSam HarrisBlank SlateNew AtheistsHarrisMisnomerChristopher HitchensHitchensNonbelief
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
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“God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.”

GodScienceExistenceEvolutionIntellectualExplanationScientificAlternativeDawkinsGod Of GapsLennox
Book:God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
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“There is yet another class that, having found that their own religion not only prevents free thinking but that some of its philosophies are also against some basic social, economic and scientific concepts of life as required by the progressive society, comes to the illogical conclusion that all religions similarly thwart the growth of progressive societies... Such people fall easy prey to materialism and denounce all religions without having any definite idea of any religion at all.”

ReligionAtheismAtheistsRichard DawkinsDawkins
Book:A Comparative Study of the Religions of Today
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“Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that the biological design argument did not falter until Darwin provided a proper naturalistic explanation for adaptive complexity; others maintain that David Hume had already shattered the argument to pieces by sheer logical force several decades earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 2007 [1779]). Elliott Sober has been among the philosophers who maintain that, as Hume was not in a position to offer a serious alternative explanation of adaptive complexity, it is hardly surprising that 'intelligent people strongly favored the design hypothesis' (Sober 2000, 36). In his most recent book, however, Sober (2008) carefully develops what he thinks is the most charitable reconstruction of the design argument, and proceeds to show why it is defective for intrinsic reasons (for earlier version of this argument, see Sober 1999, 2002). Sober argues that the design argument can be rejected even without the need to consider alternative explanations for adaptive complexity (Sober 2008, 126): 'To see why the design argument is defective, there is no need to have a view as to whether Darwin’s theory of evolution is true' (Sober 2008, 154).”

ScienceAtheismEvolutionComplexityBiologyTheory Of EvolutionDarwinCharles DarwinDavid HumeRichard DawkinsDawkinsBiological ComplexityArgument For AtheismDeathblowGraham OppyArgument From Design RefutedAtheistic ArgumentDesign Argument RefutedElliott SoberIntelligent Design Refuted
Author:Maarten Boudry
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“Det er gjort mange forsøk på å forklare hva som essensielt ligger til grunn for menneskelig religiøsitet. Det er ikke enkelt å finne forklaringer, ettersom religiøs tro kan skape flere problemer enn løsninger for den troende. Troen på guder skaffer ikke mat, den er ikke nødvendig for å bygge moral, den er tidkrevende og har åpenbart vært brukt som maktmiddel for å undertrykke mennesker gjennom historien. Å forklare religion er for noen blitt "det ondes problem", og man har spurt: Hvordan kan man forklare slike åpenbar irrasjonell og til tider destruktiv atferd? En populær forklaring på religiøsitet er fremsatt av blant andre evolusjonsbiologen Richard Dawkins og evolusjonspsykologen Steven Pinker. De sier at den menneskelige hjernen kan brukes til å få kunnskap om verden omkring oss og å finne smarte måter å løse problemer på. Den kan også brukes til å finne på tull og tøys, fiksjoner uten basis i virkeligheten, slik som harmløse forestillinger om universets opprinnelse. Eller også livsfarlige forestillinger om guder som krever at mennesker tar livet av hverandre, og at individer bruker ressurser på irrasjonelle handlinger, slik som ofring av dyrebar mat og utføring av tidkrevende rituelle handlinger. Mennesker har beviselig en hang til å forestille seg ting som ikke finnes, det er et biprodukt av evnen til å tenke, som blant annet har gitt seg utslag i religiøse fantasier.”

ReligionDawkinsPinker
Book:Arten som forandret alt
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“The problem with ID, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the intelligence behind nature may have a moral interest in us, having communicated already with humanity in the past, and might try to boss you around in your private affairs. With hypothetical advanced aliens residing at a safely distant address in the hypothetical multiverse, that is - to the relief of folks like Gribbin, Dawkins and the New Scientist - manifestly not the case.”

ScienceResponsibilityAliensJudgementAccountabilityTheismIntelligent DesignMoral ResponsibilityMultiverseIdExtraterrestrialsRichard DawkinsDawkinsMultiple UniversesMultiple UniverseNew Scientist
Author:David Klinghoffer
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“Os livros de física podem ser complicados, mas eles, assim como os carros e os computadores, são produtos de objetos biológicos - cérebros humanos. Os objetos e os fenômenos que um livro de física descreve são mais simples que uma única célula do corpo de seu autor. E o autor consiste em trilhões de células, muitas delas diferentes umas das outras, organizadas com arquitetura intrincada e engenharia de precisão para formar uma máquina capaz de escrever um livro.”

ScienceDawkins
Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
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