Background Image

...

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

-Richard Dawkins

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Natural Selection, The Blind,

Richard Dawkins

...

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Richard Dawkins

I Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

You Believe That All Humanity Came From Adam And Eve, And Humans Have Not Evolved At All Since. So Tell Me; Between The Two Of Them, Which Was Black, Which Was White, And Which Was Asian?

A Delusion That Encourages Belief Where There Is No Evidence Is Asking For Trouble. Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle. Instead, Disagreements Are Settled By Other Means Which, In Extreme Cases, Inevitably Become Violent. Scientists Disagree Among Themselves But They Never Fight Over Their Disagreements. They Argue About Evidence Or Go Out And Seek New Evidence. Much The Same Is True Of Philosophers, Historians And Literary Critics.

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

People Really, Really Hate Their Religion Being Criticized. It's As Though You've Said They Had An Ugly Face; They Seem To Identify Personally With It.

For The First Half Of Geological Time Our Ancestors Were Bacteria. Most Creatures Still Are Bacteria, And Each One Of Our Trillions Of Cells Is A Colony Of Bacteria.

I Shall Not Make An Argument Ad Hominem. My Argument Is Ad Bullshitem.

My Decision To Be A Scientist Was A Bit Of A Drift Really, More Or Less By Default.

Effective Searching Procedures Become, When The Search-space Is Sufficiently Large, Indistinguishable From True Creativity.

You Can't Understand European History At All Other Than Through Religion, Or English Literature Either If You Can't Recognise Biblical Allusions.

If Something Is True, No Amount Of Wishful Thinking Will Change It.

Wishful Thinking

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life. Because I Do Believe In God's Creative Power In Having Brought It All Into Being In The First Place, I Find That Studying The Natural World Is An Opportunity To Observe The Majesty, The Elegance, The Intricacy Of God's Creation.

My Untidy Habits Drive Me To Follow The Slash-and-burn Principle. Work On A Virgin Table Until The Mess Becomes Unbearable, Then Move On To A Clean Table In A Clean Room - Or, On A Beautiful Summer Day Like This, One Of The Five Tables Dotted Around The Garden. Trash That Table And Move On Again.

The Moral Law Is A Reason To Think Of God As Plausible - Not Just A God Who Sets The Universe In Motion But A God Who Cares About Human Beings, Because We Seem Uniquely Amongst Creatures On The Planet To Have This Far-developed Sense Of Morality.

No Matter How Much Knowledge And Wisdom You Acquire During Your Life, Not One Jot Will Be Passed On To Your Children By Genetic Means. Each New Generation Starts From Scratch.

Any Entity Capable Of Intelligently Designing Something As Improbable As Dutchman's Pipe (or A Universe) Would Have To Be Even More Improbable Than A Dutchman's Pipe. Far From Terminating The Vicious Regress, God Aggravates It With A Vengeance.

An Internet Meme Is A Hijacking Of The Original Idea. Instead Of Mutating By Random Change And Spreading By A Form Of Darwinian Selection, Internet Memes Are Altered Deliberately By Human Creativity. There Is No Attempt At Accuracy Of Copying, As With Genes - And As With Memes In Their Original Version.

All Religious Beliefs Seem Weird To People Not Brought Up In Them.

Religion Has Been A Powerful Weapon In The Hands Of Governments, In The Hands Of Priests, In The Hands Of Kings Who Have Used It As A Weapon To Keep Down The Populace. It Is A Wonderful Way Of Disciplining People And Making Them Do What You Want, To Tell Them That If They Don't Do What You Want They Will, For Example, Go To Hell.

Faith Is An Evil Precisely Because It Requires No Justification And Brooks No Argument.

I Like To Think 'the God Delusion' Is A Humorous Book. I Think, Actually, It's Full Of Laughs. And People Who Describe It As A Polarizing Book Or As An Aggressive Book, It's Just That Very Often They Haven't Read It.

Certainly I See The Scientific View Of The World As Incompatible With Religion, But That Is Not What Is Interesting About It. It Is Also Incompatible With Magic, But That Also Is Not Worth Stressing. 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.

I Respect You Too Much To Respect Your Ridiculous Ideas.

Those Who Wish To Base Their Morality Literally On The Bible Have Either Not Read It Or Not Understood It.

How Thoughtful Of God To Arrange Matters So That, Wherever You Happen To Be Born, The Local Religion Always Turns Out To Be The True One.

Saddam Hussein's Mind Would Have Been A Unique Resource For Historical, Political And Psychological Research: A Resource That Is Now Forever Unavailable To Scholars... In A Small Way His Execution Represents A Wanton And Vandalistic Destruction Of Important Research Data.

If The History-deniers Who Doubt The Fact Of Evolution Are Ignorant Of Biology, Those Who Think The World Began Less Than Ten Thousand Years Ago Are Worst Than Ignorant, They Are The Deluded To The Point Of Perversity.

Humans Are Just A Very, Very Small Part Of The Panoply Of Life, And It Is Arguable That In A Certain Sense, Humans Have Emancipated Themselves From Darwinian Selection.

Our Subjective Judgment Of What Seems Like A Good Bet Is Irrelevant To What Is Actually A Good Bet.

If You're Willing To Answer Yes To A God Outside Of Nature, Then There's Nothing Inconsistent With God On Rare Occasions Choosing To Invade The Natural World In A Way That Appears Miraculous.

The Idea Of Tiny Changes Cumulated Over Many Steps Is An Immensely Powerful Idea, Capable Of Explaining An Enormous Range Of Things That Would Be Otherwise Inexplicable.

An Intelligent Couple Can Read Their Darwin And Know That The Ultimate Reason For Their Sexual Urges Is Procreation. They Know That The Woman Cannot Conceive Because She Is On The Pill. Yet They Find That Their Sexual Desire Is In No Way Diminished By The Knowledge. Sexual Desire Is Sexual Desire And Its Force, In An Individual's Psychology, Is Independent Of The Ultimate Darwinian Pressure That Drove It. It Is A Strong Urge Which Exists Independently Of Its Ultimate Rationale.

Let's Get Up Off Our Knees, Stop Cringing Before Bogeymen And Virtual Fathers, Face Reality, And Help Science To Do Something Constructive About Human Suffering.

Our Leaders Have Described The Recent Atrocity With The Customary Cliche: Mindless Cowardice. Mindless May Be A Suitable Word For The Vandalising Of A Telephone Box. It Is Not Helpful For Understanding What Hit New York On September 11. Those People Were Not Mindless And They Were Certainly Not Cowards. On The Contrary, They Had Sufficiently Effective Minds Braced With An Insane Courage, And It Would Pay Us Mightily To Understand Where That Courage Came From. It Came From Religion.

Faith Can Be Very Very Dangerous, And Deliberately To Implant It Into The Vulnerable Mind Of An Innocent Child Is A Grievous Wrong.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life. Within Decades We Must Close Our Eyes Again. Isn’t It A Noble, An Enlightened Way Of Spending Our Brief Time In The Sun, To Work At Understanding The Universe And How We Have Come To Wake Up In It? This Is How I Answer When I Am Asked—as I Am Surprisingly Often—why I Bother To Get Up In The Mornings.

If There Is A God, It's Going To Be A Whole Lot Bigger And A Whole Lot More Incomprehensible Than Anything That Any Theologian Of Any Religion Has Ever Proposed.

If There Is A God

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.

Natural Selection, The Blind, Unconscious, Automatic Process Which Darwin Discovered, And Which We Now Know Is The Explanation Forthe Existence And Apparently Purposeful Form Of All Life, Has No Purpose In Mind. It Has No Mind And No Mind's Eye. It Does Not Plan For The Future. It Has No Vision, No Foresight, No Sight At All. If It Can Be Said To Play The Role Of The Watchmaker In Nature, It Is The Blind Watchmaker.

People Who Believe In God Conclude There Must Have Been A Divine Knob Twiddler Who Twiddled The Knobs Of These Half-dozen Constants To Get Them Exactly Right. The Problem Is That This Says, Because Something Is Vastly Improbable, We Need A God To Explain It. But That God Himself Would Be Even More Improbable.

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.

If You're An Atheist, You Know, You Believe, This Is The Only Life You're Going To Get. It's A Precious Life. It's A Beautiful Life. Its Something We Should Live To The Full, To The End Of Our Days. Where If You're Religious And You Believe In Another Life Somehow, That Means You Don't Live This Life To The Full Because You Think You're Going To Get Another One. That's An Awfully Negative Way To Live A Life. Being A Atheist Frees You Up To Live This Life Properly, Happily And Fully

Steve Grand Is The Creator Of What I Think Is The Nearest Approach To Artificial Life So Far, And His First Book, Creation: Life And How To Make It, Is As Interesting As You Would Expect. But He Illuminates More Than Just The Properties Of Life: His Originality Extends To Matter Itself And The Very Nature Of Reality. Not Since David Deutsch's The Fabric Of Reality Have I Encountered Such A Compelling Invitation To Think Everything Out Afresh, From The Bottom Up.

Organizing Atheists Is A Bit Like Herding Cats; They Are On The Whole Too Intelligent And Independent Minded To Lend Themselves To Being Herded.

It Really Comes Down To Parsimony, Economy Of Explanation. It Is Possible That Your Car Engine Is Driven By Psychokinetic Energy, But If It Looks Like A Petrol Engine, Smells Like A Petrol Engine And Performs Exactly As Well As A Petrol Engine, The Sensible Working Hypothesis Is That It Is A Petrol Engine.

The Mob Hysteria Over Pedophiles Has Reached Epidemic Proportions And Driven Parents To Panic. Today's Just Williams, Today's Huck Finns, Today's Swallows And Amazons Are Deprived Of The Freedom To Roam That Was One Of The Delights Of Childhood In Earlier Times (when The Actual, As Opposed To The Perceived, Risk Of Molestation Was Probably No Less).

There Is An Attitude In The Culture That Says That Everybody Is Entitled To Their Opinion. You Got To Respect Their Opinion. No, You Damn Well Haven't Got To Respect Their Opinion.

Things Exist Either Because They Have Recently Come Into Existence Or Because They Have Qualities That Made Them Unlikely To Be Destroyed In The Past.

Maybe Somewhere In Some Other Galaxy There Is A Super-intelligence So Colossal That From Our Point Of View It Would Be A God. But It Cannot Have Been The Sort Of God That We Need To Explain The Origin Of The Universe, Because It Cannot Have Been There That Early.

Anybody Who Objects To Cloning On Principle Has To Answer To All The Identical Twins In The World Who Might Be Insulted By The Thought That There Is Something Offensive About Their Very Existence. Clones Are Simply Identical Twins.

I Find That Religion Really Does Motivate People To Do Horrible Things Because They Have This Passionate Faith In Whatever Their Religion Happens To Be, And It Teaches Them That The Other Religion Is The Wrong One.

What I Am Skeptical About Is The Idea That Whatever Wonderful Revelation Does Come In The Science Of The Future, It Will Turn Out To Be One Of The Particular Historical Religions That People Happen To Have Dreamed Up.

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.

My Last Vestige Of 'hands Off Religion' Respect Disappeared In The Smoke And Choking Dust Of September 11, 2001, Followed By The 'national Day Of Prayer,' When Prelates And Pastors Did Their Tremulous Martin Luther King Impersonations And Urged People Of Mutually Incompatible Faiths To Hold Hands, United In Homage To The Very Force That Caused The Problem In The First Place.

[if] There Is Mercy In Nature, It Is Accidental. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

St. Augustine Explicitly Warns Against A Very Narrow Perspective That Will Put Our Faith At Risk Of Looking Ridiculous. If You Step Back From That One Narrow Interpretation, What The Bible Describes Is Very Consistent With The Big Bang.

I Am Thrilled To Be Alive At Time When Humanity Is Pushing Against The Limits Of Understanding. Even Better, We May Eventually Discover That There Are No Limits.

It Can Be Consoling To Think Your Children Are In Heaven. You Have Got To Understand That That Doesn't Make It True. Many People Cannot Understand That Distinction.

Scientific Truth Is Too Beautiful To Be Sacrificed For The Sake Of Light Entertainment Or Money. Astrology Is An Aesthetic Affront. It Cheapens Astronomy, Like Using Beethoven For Commercial Jingles.

It's An Important Point To Realize That The Genetic Programming Of Our Lives Is Not Fully Deterministic. It Is Statistical - It Is In Any Animal Merely Statistical - Not Deterministic.

I'm Not One Of Those Who Wants To Purge Our Society Of Our Christian History.

Part Of The Appeal Was That Medawar Was Not Only A Nobel Laureate, But He Seemed Like A Nobel Laureate; He Was Everything One Thought A Nobel Laureate Ought To Be. If You Have Ever Wondered Why Scientists Like Popper, Try Medawar's Exposition. Actually Most Popperian Scientists Have Probably Never Tried Reading Anything But Medawar's Exposition.

Religious Faith, Is A State Of Mind, That Leads People To Believe In Something, It Doesn't Matter What, Without A Whisper Of Doubt, Or A Whiff Of Evidence, And Believe So Strongly In Some Cases, That They Are Prepare To Kill And Die For It, Without The Need For Further Justification.

[it] Is Capable Of Driving People To Such Dangerous Folly That Faith Seems To Me To Qualify As A Kind Of Mental Illness.

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

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.

Alister Mcgrath Has Now Written Two Books With My Name In The Title. The Poet W. B. Yeats, When Asked To Say Something About Bad Poets Who Made A Living By Parasitizing Him, Wrote The Splendid Line, 'was There Ever Dog That Praised His Fleas?

The World And The Universe Is An Extremely Beautiful Place, And The More We Understand About It The More Beautiful Does It Appear.

Why Would An All-powerful Creator Decide To Plant His Carefully Crafted Species On Islands And Continents In Exactly The Appropriate Pattern To Suggest, Irresistibly, That They Had Evolved And Dispersed From The Site Of Their Evolution?

I Think That's The Mother And Father Of All Cop-outs. It's An Honest Scientific Quest To Discover Where This Apparent Improbability Comes From. Now [francis] Collins Says, "well, God Did It. And God Needs No Explanation Because God Is Outside All This." Well, What An Incredible Evasion Of The Responsibility To Explain. Scientists Don't Do That. Scientists Say, "we're Working On It. We're Struggling To Understand."

How Any Government Could Promote The Vardy Academies In The North-east Of England Is Absolutely Beyond Me. Tony Blair Defends Them On Grounds Of Diversity, But It Should Be Unthinkable In The 21st Century To Have A School Whose Head Of Science Believes The World Is Less Than 10,000 Years Old.

In A Way, I Think Religion Is To Be Admired For Asking The Right Questions. I Just Think It's Got The Wrong Answers.

It's About Time We Start Criticizing Faith.

In Two Senses: One Is That You Cannot Go On The Street And Shout That You Are An Atheist, The Other Is That You Are Never Given The Intellectual Framework For Calling Your Faith Into Question.

Creationists And Holocaust Deniers Are Both Very Similar - Both Are Denying What Is A Perfectly Manifest Fact. In The Case Of Holocaust Deniers It's More Recent History, But In Both Cases The Evidence - In Favour Of The Holocaust And Evolution - Is Simply Overwhelming. That Doesn't Mean They Are Morally Or Politically Equivalent. But They Are Equivalent In Denying History.

The Idea Of An Afterlife Where You Can Be Reunited With Loved Ones Can Be Immensely Consoling - Though Not To Me.

I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

The Fear Of Hell Is A Very Powerful Motivation.

We, Alone On Earth, Can Rebel Against The Tyranny Of The Selfish Replicators.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

And The Beauty Of The Anthropic Principle Is That It Tells Us, Against All Intuition, That A Chemical Model Need Only Predict That Life Will Arise On One Planet In A Billion Billion To Give Us A Good And Entirely Satisfying Explanation For The Presence Of Life Here.

An Atheist Before Darwin Could Have Said, Following Hume: I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One. I Can't Help Feeling That Such A Position, Though Logically Sound, Would Have Left One Feeling Pretty Unsatisfied, And That Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

Atheists Are The New Gays; In The Closet And Pretty Much Disqualified From Public Office.

They Are Either People Of Faith Who Have Lost Their Faith From Reading My Books, Or They Are People Who Had Already Lost Their Faith, And Something About My Books Encouraged Them To Affirm That.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

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.

If We Ever Talk To Aliens, Their Civilisation Will Be Far More Advanced Than Ours (because Of Distances Involved). They Won't Be Religious!

A Child Is Not A Christian Child, Not A Muslim Child, But A Child Of Christian Parents Or A Child Of Muslim Parents. This Latter Nomenclature, By The Way, Would Be An Excellent Piece Of Consciousness-raising For The Children Themselves. A Child Who Is Told She Is A 'child Of Muslim Parents' Will Immediately Realize That Religion Is Something For Her To Choose -or Reject- When She Becomes Old Enough To Do So.

Reductionism Is A Dirty Word, And A Kind Of 'holistier Than Thou' Self-righteousness Has Become Fashionable.

Natural Selection Is All About The Differential Success Of Rival Dna In Getting Itself Transmitted Vertically In The Species Archives.

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

There Is Something So Mysterious That It Is Almost Like God. God Is In The Equations. God Is In The Fundamental Constants. And That's Fine. I Mean, That's Just Redefinition Of That Which We Find Mysterious At The Basis Of The Universe.

There Is No Reason To Regard God As Immune From Consideration Along The Spectrum Of Probabilities. And There Is Certainly No Reason To Suppose That, Just Because God Can Be Neither Proved Nor Disproved, His Probability Of Existence Is 50 Per Cent.

Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

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.

There Are Very Interesting Controversies Within Evolution; However, Whether Evolution Occurs Is Not One Of Them. It Definitely Does.

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think.

The Bible Should Be Taught, But Emphatically Not As Reality. It Is Fiction, Myth, Poetry, Anything But Reality. As Such It Needs To Be Taught Because It Underlies So Much Of Our Literature And Our Culture.

Religions Do Make Claims About The Universe--the Same Kinds Of Claims That Scientists Make, Except They're Usually False.

It Has Become Almost A Cliché To Remark That Nobody Boasts Of Ignorance Of Literature, But It Is Socially Acceptable To Boast Ignorance Of Science And Proudly Claim Incompetence In Mathematics.

My Mind Is Open To The Most Wonderful Range Of Future Possibilities, Which I Cannot Even Dream About.

A Universe With A God Would Look Quite Different From A Universe Without One. A Physics, A Biology Where There Is A God Is Bound To Look Different. So The Most Basic Claims Of Religion Are Scientific. Religion Is A Scientific Theory.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realize That We Are Apes.

Pantheism Is Sexed-up Atheism. Deism Is Watered-down Theism.

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.

If You Want To Do Evil, Science Provides The Most Powerful Weapons To Do Evil; But Equally, If You Want To Do Good, Science Puts Into Your Hands The Most Powerful Tools To Do So

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.

You Don't Believe That The Earth Is Round Only If You're An Astronaut. You Don't Believe Napoleon Existed Only If You're A Historian. You Believe These Things Because They're Facts, Proved By Evidence.

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.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries, We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life.

A God Who Is Capable Of Sending Intelligible Signals To Millions Of People Simultaneously, And Of Receiving Messages From All Of Them Simultaneously, Cannot Be, Whatever Else He Might Be, Simple. Such Bandwidth!

I've Always Been Antagonistic To Any Naïve Application Of The Selfish Gene Theory To Politics. Some People Have Attempted To Suggest That It Means We Are Selfish Or We Should Be Selfish.

It's A Truly Disgusting Idea That The Creator Of The Universe - Capable Of Inventing The Laws Of Physics And Designing The Evolutionary Process - That This Protégé Of Supernatural Intellect Couldn't Think Of A Better Way To Forgive Our Sins Than To Have Himself Tortured To Death.

Faith Is Not The Opposite Of Reason.

Evolution Has No Long-term Goal. There Is No Long-distance Target, No Final Perfection To Serve As A Criterion For Selection, Although Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

Science Is The Disinterested Search For The Objective Truth About The Material World.

Objective Truth

I'm Pretty Sure There Is Some Genetic Component Towards Intelligence.

If You Were To Actually Travel Around Schools And Universities And Listen In On Lectures About Evolution You Might Find A Fairly Substantial Fraction Of Young People, Without Knowing What It Is They Disapprove Of, Think They Disapprove Of It, Because They've Been Brought Up To.

Book Critics Or Theatre Critics Can Be Derisively Negative And Gain Delighted Praise For The Trenchant With Of Their Review. But In Criticisms Of Religion Even Clarity Ceases To Be A Virtue And Sounds Like Aggressive Hostility. A Politician May Attack An Opponent Scathingly Across The Floor Of The House And Earn Plaudits For His Robust Pugnacity. But Let A Soberly Reasoning Critic Of Religion Employ What Would In Other Contexts Sound Merely Direct Or Forthright, And It Will Be Described As A 'rant'.

Science Has Taught Us, Against All Intuition, That Apparently Solid Things Like Crystals And Rocks Are Really Almost Entirely Composed Of Empty Space. And The Familiar Illustration Is The Nucleus Of An Atom Is A Fly In The Middle Of A Sports Stadium, And The Next Atom Is In The Next Sports Stadium.

I Just Would Like To Say That Over More Than A Quarter-century As A Scientist And A Believer, I Find Absolutely Nothing In Conflict Between Agreeing With Richard [dawkins] In Practically All Of His Conclusions About The Natural World, And Also Saying That I Am Still Able To Accept And Embrace The Possibility That There Are Answers That Science Isn't Able To Provide About The Natural World - The Questions About Why Instead Of The Questions About How. I'm Interested In The Whys.

If You Don't Know Anything About Computers, Just Remember That They Are Machines That Do Exactly What You Tell Them But Often Surprise You In The Result.

There May Be Some Deep Questions About The Cosmos That Are Forever Beyond Science. The Mistake Is To Think They Are Therefore Not Beyond Religion Too.

Religion Is Unusual Among Divisive Labels In Being Spectacularly Unnecessary. If Religious Beliefs Had Any Evidence Going For Them, We Might Have To Respect Them In Spite Of Their Concomitant Unpleasantness. But There Is No Such Evidence. To Label People As Death-deserving Enemies Because Of Disagreements About Real World Politics Is Bad Enough. To Do The Same For Disagreements About A Delusional World Inhabited By Archangels, Demons And Imaginary Friends Is Ludicrously Tragic.

We Admit That We Are Like Apes, But We Seldom Realise That We Are Apes. Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees And Gorillas Is Much More Recent Than Their Common Ancestor With The Asian Apes - The Gibbons And Orangutans. There Is No Natural Category That Includes Chimpanzees, Gorillas And Orangutans But Excludes Humans.

Do You Really Mean To Tell Me The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward, Or To Avoid His Disapproval And Punishment? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up, Apple-polishing, Looking Over Your Shoulder At The Great Surveillance Camera In The Sky, Or The Still Small Wiretap Inside Your Head, Monitoring Your Every Move, Even Your Every Base Though.

Surveillance Cameras

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

Physicists Have Come Up With Other Explanations. One Is To Say That These Six Constants Are Not Free To Vary. Some Unified Theory Will Eventually Show That They Are As Locked In As The Circumference And The Diameter Of A Circle. That Reduces The Odds Of Them All Independently Just Happening To Fit The Bill.

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?

People Who Believe The Earth Was Created 6000 Years Ago, When It's Actually 4.5 Billion Years Old, Should Also Believe The Width Of North America Is 8 Yards. That Is The Scale Of The Error.

We've All Been Brought Up With The View That Religion Has Some Kind Of Special Privileged Status. You're Not Allowed To Criticise It.

All Qualified Physicists, Biologists, Cosmologists And Geologists Agree, On The Basis Of Massive, Mutually Corroborating Evidence, That The Earth's Age Is At Least Four Billion Years.

Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, Distinctly Heard The Voice Of Jesus Telling Him To Kill Women, And He Was Locked Up For Life. George W. Bush Says That God Told Him To Invade Iraq (a Pity God Didn't Vouchsafe Him A Revelation That There Were No Weapons Of Mass Destruction).

Mass Destruction

I Think From My Point Of View - I Won't Say It Doesn't Matter Whether [darwinian Explanations] Are Right Or Wrong, It's Just Sufficient In Some Cases, For Me, To Be Able To Say, Well, At Least It's Not Totally Implausible From A Darwinian Point Of View.

Myths Are Fun, As Long As You Don't Confuse Them With The Truth.

My Personal Feeling Is That Understanding Evolution Led Me To Atheism.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

The Time Has Come For People Of Reason To Say: Enough Is Enough! Religious Faith Discourages Independent Thought, It's Divisive And It's Dangerous.

There's No Point Of Having Faith If You Have Evidence.

To An Honest Judge, The Alleged Convergence Between Religion And Science Is A Shallow, Empty, Hollow, Spin-doctored Sham.

I Speak As A Private Citizen And Not As A Representative Of The Executive Branch Of The United States Government. The Impression That People Of Faith Are Uniformly Opposed To Stem-cell Research Is Not Documented By Surveys. In Fact, Many People Of Strong Religious Conviction Think This Can Be A Morally Supportable Approach.

What Is The Purpose Of The Universe?" Is A Silly Question.

Creationists Eagerly Seek A Gap In Present-day Knowledge Or Understanding. If An Apparent Gap Is Found, It Is Assumed That God, By Default, Must Fill It.

I Read Novels For Entertainment Rather Than For Edification, So I Tend Not To Read The Sort Of Novels That Are Said To Illuminate The Human Condition.

Such Is The Breathtaking Speciesism Of Our Christian-inspired Attitudes, The Abortion Of A Single Human Zygote Can Arouse More Moral Solicitude And Righteous Indignation Than The Vivasection Of Any Number Of Intelligent Adult Chimpanzees! The Only Reason We Can Be Comfortable With Such A Double Standard Is That The Intermediates Between Humans And Chimps Are All Dead.

Dna Is Rom. It Can Be Read Millions Of Times Over, But Only Written To Once - When It Is First Assembled The Birth Of The Cell In Which It Resides.

There's An Element Of Paradox There - That At Least You Know Where You Stand With The Fundamentalists. I Mean, They're Absolutely Clear In Their Error And Their Stupidity, And So You Can Really Go After Them.

[r]eductionism' Is One Of Those Things, Like Sin, That Is Only Mentioned By People Who Are Against It. To Call Oneself A Reductionist Will Sound, In Some Circles, A Bit Like Admitting To Eating Babies. But, Just As Nobody Actually Eats Babies, So Nobody Is Really A Reductionist In Any Sense Worth Being Against.

I Think By The Age Of About Nine I Recognized That There Were A Lot Of Different Religions, And It Was An Accident I Happened To Be Born Into One Of Them. If I Had Been Born Somewhere Else, I Would Have Had A Different One. Which Is A Pretty Good Lesson, Actually. Everyone Should Learn That.

The Bishop Goes On To The Human Eye, Asking Rhetorically, And With The Implication That There Is No Answer, 'how Could An Organ So Complex Evolve?' This Is Not An Argument, It Is Simply An Affirmation Of Incredulity.

[the Internet] Is By Far The Most Important Innovation In The Media In My Lifetime. It's Like Having A Huge Encyclopedia Permanently Available. There's A Tremendous Amount Of Rubbish On The World Wide Web, But Retrieval Of What You Want To So Rapid That It Doesn't Really Matter

For Centuries The Most Powerful Argument For God's Existence From The Physical World Was The So-called Argument From Design: Living Things Are So Beautiful And Elegant And So Apparently Purposeful, They Could Only Have Been Made By An Intelligent Designer. But [charles] Darwin Provided A Simpler Explanation. His Way Is A Gradual, Incremental Improvement Starting From Very Simple Beginnings And Working Up Step By Tiny Incremental Step To More Complexity, More Elegance, More Adaptive Perfection.

Yes, Testosterone-sodden Young Men Too Unattractive To Get A Woman In This World Might Be Desperate Enough To Go For 72 Private Virgins In The Next.

A Designer God Cannot Be Used To Explain Organized Complexity Because Any God Capable Of Designing Anything Would Have To Be Complex Enough To Demand The Same Kind Of Explanation In His Own Right.

God's Existence Is Either True Or Not. But Calling It A Scientific Question Implies That The Tools Of Science Can Provide The Answer.

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.

Deep Understanding

Real Life Seeks The Gentle Slopes At The Back Of Mount Improbable, While Creationists Are Blind To All But The Daunting Precipice At The Front.

The Universe We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Blind, Pitiless Indifference.

Faith Is The Lack Of Evidence, And It Shouldn't Be That Difficult To Convince People That The Right Reason To Believe Something Is That There Is Evidence For It. People Do Not Innately Go For This View, But Nevertheless It Is Not That Difficult To Teach.

Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant.

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.

We Don't Need Fossils - The Case For Evolution Is Watertight Without Them; So It Is Paradoxical To Use Gaps In The Fossil Record As Though They Were Evidence Against Evolution

There Isn't [in New Atheism]. Nothing That Wasn't In Bertrand Russell Or Probably Robert Ingersoll. But I Suppose It Is More Of A Political Effect, In That All These Books Happened To Come Out At The Same Time. I Like To Think That We Have Some Influence.

The Word 'mundane' Has Come To Mean 'boring' And 'dull', And It Really Shouldn't - It Should Mean The Opposite. Because It Comes From The Latin Mundus, Meaning 'the World'. And The World Is Anything But Dull: The World Is Wonderful. There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

Bereavement Is Terrible, Of Course. And When Somebody You Love Dies, It's A Time For Reflection, A Time For Memory, A Time For Regret.

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

People Sometimes Say That You Must Believe In Feelings Deep Inside, Otherwise You'd Never Be Confident Of Things Like 'my Wife Loves Me'. But This Is A Bad Argument. There Can Be Plenty Of Evidence That Somebody Loves You. All Through The Day When You Are With Somebody Who Loves You, You See And Hear Lots Of Little Tidbits Of Evidence, And They All Add Up. It Isn't Purely Inside Feeling, Like The Feeling That Priests Call Revelation. There Are Outside Things To Back Up The Inside Feeling: Looks In The Eye, Tender Notes In The Voice, Little Favors And Kindnesses; This Is All Real Evidence.

It Is Possible To Enjoy The Mozart Concerto Without Being Able To Play The Clarinet. In Fact, You Can Learn To Be An Expert Connoisseur Of Music Without Being Able To Play A Note On Any Instrument. Of Course, Music Would Come To A Halt If Nobody Ever Learned To Play It. But If Everybody Grew Up Thinking That Music Was Synonymous With Playing It, Think How Relatively Impoverished Many Lives Would Be. Couldn't We Learn To Think Of Science In The Same Way?

I Am Not An Enthusiast For Diversity Of Opinion Where Facts Are Concerned.

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.

Ten Commandments

Sometimes In Life It Is A Good Idea To Stop,sometimes It Is A Good Idea To Go On. The Trick Is To Decide When To Stop

Being An Atheist Frees You Up To Live This Life Properly, Happily, And Fully.

We Are A Very, Very Unusual Species.

Molecular Evidense Suggests That Our Common Ancestor With The Chimpanzees Lived, In Africa, Between 5 And 7 Million Years Ago, Say Half A Million Generations Ago. This Is Not Long By Evolutionary Standards.

Imagine A Crime Series In Which, Every Week, There Is A White Suspect And A Black Suspect. And Every Week, Lo And Behold, The Black One Turns Out To Have Done It. Unpardonable, Of Course. And My Point Is That You Could Not Defend It By Saying: "but It's Only Fiction, Only Entertainment."

If It Suits [god] To Be A Deity That We Must Seek Without Being Forced To, Would It Not Have Been Sensible For Him To Use The Mechanism Of Evolution Without Posting Obvious Road Signs To Reveal His Role In Creation?

If You Are Religious At All, It Is Overwhelmingly Probable That Your Religion Is That Of Your Parents. If You Were Born In Arkansas And You Think Christianity Is True And Islam False (knowing Full Well That You Would Think The Opposite If You Had Been Born In Afghanistan), You Are The Victim Of Childhood Indoctrination.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

I Get The Feeling More And More That Religion Is Being Left Behind.

If You Want To Do Bad Things, Science Is The Most Powerful Way To Do Them.

We Cannot Prove That There Is No God, But We Can Safely Conclude The He Is Very, Very Improbable Indeed.

There Is No God

Yesterday's Dangerous Idea Is Today's Orthodoxy And Tomorrow's Cliché.

Dangerous Ideas

Most Of What We Strive For In Our Modern Life Uses The Apparatus Of Goal Seeking That Was Originally Set Up To Seek Goals In The State Of Nature.

Of Course You Can Have An Opinion About Islam Without Having Read Qur'an. You Don't Have To Read Mein Kampf To Have An Opinion About Nazism.

Superficially It's A Problem If Homosexuality Is Genetic - If The Difference Between People's Sexual Preferences Is Genetic - Because At Least A Pure Homosexual Would Be Unlikely To Reproduce And Therefore Pass On The Genes. So The First Question You Ask Is, Is It Actually Genetic, And The Answer Is Probably To Some Extent Yes.

There Is No Reason For Believing That Any Sort Of Gods Exist, And Quite Good Reasons For Believing That They Do Not Exist And Never Have. It Has All Been A Gigantic Waste Of Time And A Waste Of Life. It Would Be A Joke Of Cosmic Proportions If It Weren't So Tragic.

My Thoughts, My Beliefs, My Feelings Are All In My Brain. My Brain Is Going To Rot.

Human Psychology Has A Near Universal Tendency To Let Belief Be Coloured By Desire.

The Trouble With Conspiracies, Even Those That Are To Everybody's Advantage In The Long Run, Is That They Are Open To Abuse. If Manipulators Really Had The Powers Claimed, They Could Win The Lottery Every Week. I Prefer To Point Out That They Could Also Win A Nobel Prize For Discovering Fundamental Physical Forces Hitherto Unknown To Science.

Each Step Is Not Too Improbable For Us To Countenance, But When You Add Them Up Cumulatively Over Millions Of Years, You Get These Monsters Of Improbability, Like The Human Brain And The Rain Forest. It Should Warn Us Against Ever Again Assuming That Because Something Is Complicated, God Must Have Done It.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

Presumably What Happened To Jesus Was What Happens To All Of Us When We Die. We Decompose. Accounts Of Jesus's Resurrection And Ascension Are About As Well-documented As Jack And The Beanstalk.

Let Us Try To Teach Generosity And Altruism, Because We Are Born Selfish.

Thought Provoking

Science Coverage Could Be Improved By The Recognition That Science Is Timeless, And Therefore Science Stories Should Not Need To Be Pegged To An Item In The News.

Aquarius Is A Miscellaneous Set Of Stars All At Different Distances From Us, Which Have No Connection With Each Other Except That They Constitute A (meaningless) Pattern When Seen From A Certain (not Particularly Special) Place In The Galaxy (here).

Most Of The Ones [nobel Prizes] That Have Gone To Muslims Have Been Peace Prizes, And The [number Of Muslims] Who Have Gotten Them For Scientific Work Is Exceedingly Low. But In Jews, It Is Exceedingly High.

The Majority Of Children Born Into The World Tend To Inherit The Beliefs Of Their Parents, And That To Me Is One Of The Most Regrettable Facts Of Them All

Even Those Who Do Not, Or Cannot, Avail Themselves Of A Scientific Education, Choose To Benefit From The Technology That Is Made Possible By The Scientific Education Of Others.

Religious People Split Into Three Main Groups When Faced With Science. I Shall Label Them The "know-nothings", The "know-alls", And The "no-contests."

...there Are No Natural Borderlines In Evolution. The Illusion Of A Borderline Is Created By The Fact That The Evolutionary Intermediates Happen To Be Extinct.

Trending Author

Gabriel Iglesias

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Category