Background Image

...

That There Is A Continuous Link From Humans To Gorillas, With The Intermediate Species Merely Long Dead, Is Beyond The Understanding Of Speciesists. Tie The Label Homo Sapiens Even To A Tiny Piece Of Insensible Embryonic Tissue, And Its Life Suddenly Leaps To Infinite, Incomputable Value.... Self-styled Pro-lifers, And Others That Indulge In Footling Debates About Exactly When In Its Development A Foetus Becomes Human, Exhibit The Same Discontinuous Mentality. Human, To The Discontinuous Mind, Is An Absolutist Concept. There Can Be No Half Measures. And From This Flows Much Evil.

-Richard Dawkins

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

That There Is A

Richard Dawkins

...

That There Is A Continuous Link From Humans To Gorillas, With The Intermediate Species Merely Long Dead, Is Beyond The Understanding Of Speciesists. Tie The Label Homo Sapiens Even To A Tiny Piece Of Insensible Embryonic Tissue, And Its Life Suddenly Leaps To Infinite, Incomputable Value.... Self-styled Pro-lifers, And Others That Indulge In Footling Debates About Exactly When In Its Development A Foetus Becomes Human, Exhibit The Same Discontinuous Mentality. Human, To The Discontinuous Mind, Is An Absolutist Concept. There Can Be No Half Measures. And From This Flows Much Evil.

Views: 7

Topic

More From Richard Dawkins

There Is No Such Thing As A Christian Child: Only A Child Of Christian Parents.

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

Most Thoughtful People Would Agree That Morality In The Absence Of Policing Is Somehow More Truly Moral Than The Kind Of False Morality That Vanishes As Soon As The Police Go On Strike Or The Spy Camera Is Switched Off, Whether The Spy Camera Is A Real One Monitored In The Police Station Or An Imaginary One In Heaven.

I Could Easily Believe That Religion Could Enhance Health And Hence Survival, And That Therefore There Could Be Indeed Be Literally Darwinian Survival Value, Darwinian Selection In Favor Of Religion. None Of That Of Course Bears At All Upon The Truth Value Of The Claims Made By Religions.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

We Think We Know That Chimpanzees Are Higher Animals And Earthworms Are Lower, We Think We've Always Known What That Means, And We Think Evolution Makes It Even Clearer. But It Doesn't. It Is By No Means Clear That It Means Anything At All. Or If It Means Anything, It Means So Many Different Things To Be Misleading, Even Pernicious.

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

Isn't It Sad To Go To Your Grave Without Ever Wondering Why You Were Born? Who, With Such A Thought, Would Not Spring From Bed, Eager To Resume Discovering The World And Rejoicing To Be Part Of It?

My Objection To Supernatural Beliefs Is Precisely That They Miserably Fail To Do Justice To The Sublime Grandeur Of The Real World. They Represent A Narrowing-down From Reality, An Impoverishment Of What The Real World Has To Offer.

Theologians Will Protest That The Story Of Abraham Sacrificing Issac Should Not Be Taken As Literal Fact. And The Appropriate Response Is Twofold: First, Many, Many People Even To This Day, Do Take The Whole Of Their Scripture To Be Literal Fact, And They Have A Great Deal Of Political Power Over The Rest Of Us, Especially In The United States And In The Islamic World. Second, If Not Of Literal Fact, How Should We Take The Story? As An Alagory? Then An Alagory For What? Surely, Nothing Praiseworthy. As A Moral Lesson? But What Kind Of Morals Could One Derive From This Appalling Story?

Even If It Were True That Evolution, Or The Teaching Of Evolution, Encouraged Immorality That Would Not Imply That The Theory Of Evolution Was False.

Theory Of Evolution

It's A Flaw In Our Argument, For Sure. By Any Reading Of Evolutionary Theory, Creationists Ought To Have Died Out Ages Ago. They Serve No Function In The Planet's Ecosystem, And No Other Species Has Survived So Long While In Such Fundamental Disagreement With Observable Reality. If I Wasn't Such An Ardent Believer In Secular Materialism, I'd Wager This Is Really Troubling Darwin In The Afterlife.

The Deceitful Misquoting Of Scientists To Suit An Anti-scientific Agenda Ranks Among The Many Unchristian Habits Of Fundamentalist Authors.

Evil…doesn’t Mean Doing Things That Have Bad Consequences For People. It Means Private Thoughts And Actions That Are Not To “the Christian Majority’s” Private Liking.

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

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.

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

I Personally Would Consider It To Be An Honour To Be Fossilized.

I Don't Feel Depressed. I Feel Elated.

Barring A Theoretical Resolution, Which I Think Is Unlikely, You Either Have To Say There Are Zillions Of Parallel Universes Out There That We Can't Observe At Present Or You Have To Say There Was A Plan. I Actually Find The Argument Of The Existence Of A God Who Did The Planning More Compelling Than The Bubbling Of All These Multiverses.

It Could Be Any Of A Billion Gods. It Could Be God Of The Martians Or Of The Inhabitants Of Alpha Centauri. The Chance Of Its Being A Particular God, Yahweh, The God Of Jesus, Is Vanishingly Small - At The Least, The Onus Is On You To Demonstrate Why You Think That's The Case.

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.

Science Tells Us What We Have Reason To Believe. Not What We Have A Duty To Believe. Not What Experts, In Their Pontificating Wisdom, Instruct Us To Believe... No, Science Tells Us What There Is Good Reason To Believe.

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

My Point Is Not That Religion Itself Is The Motivation For Wars, Murders And Terrorist Attacks, But That Religion Is The Principal Label, And The Most Dangerous One, By Which A "they" As Opposed To A "we" Can Be Identified At All.

My Passion Is For Scientific Truth. I Don't Much Care About Good And Evil. ... I Care About What's True.

But, However Many Ways There May Be Of Being Alive, It Is Certain That There Are Vastly More Ways Of Being Dead, Or Rather Not Alive.

The Present Luddism Over Genetic Engineering May Die A Natural Death As The Computer-illiterate Generation Is Superseded.... I Fear That, If The Green Movement's High-amplitude Warnings Over Gmos Turn Out To Be Empty, People Will Be Dangerously Disinclined To Listen To Other And More Serious Warnings.

Religion: Together We Can Find The Cure.

Together We Can

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

You Cannot Be Both Sane And Well Educated And Disbelieve In Evolution. The Evidence Is So Strong That Any Sane, Educated Person Has Got To Believe In Evolution.

Such Delusions Of Grandeur To Think That A God With A Hundred Billion Galaxies On His Mind Would Give A Tuppenny Damn Who You Sleep With, Or Indeed Whether You Believe In Him.

Science Offers Us An Explanation Of How Complexity (the Difficult) Arose Out Of Simplicity (the Easy). The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain. It Postulates The Difficult To Explain, And Leaves It At That.

A Delusion Is Something That People Believe In Despite A Total Lack Of Evidence.

It Doesn't Hurt My Feeling When I Get Vilified By Fundamentalist Religious People. I've Actually Made Comedy Out Of It. I've Made Light Of That.

Intelligent Life On A Planet Comes Of Age When It First Works Out The Reason For Its Own Existence.

I Think The World's Always A Better Place If People Are Filled With Understanding.

Faith Is Belief Without Evidence And Reason; Coincidentally That's Also The Definition Of Delusion.

With So Many Mind-bytes To Be Downloaded, So Many Mental Codons To Be Replicated, It Is No Wonder That Child Brains Are Gullible, Open To Almost Any Suggestion, Vulnerable To Subversion, Easy Prey To Moonies, Scientologists And Nuns. Like Immune-deficient Patients, Children Are Wide Open To Mental Infections That Adults Might Brush Off Without Effort.

Whether We Ever Get To Know About Them Or Not, There Are Very Probably Alien Civilizations That Are Superhuman, To The Point Of Being God-like In Ways That Exceed Anything A Theologian Could Possibly Imagine. Their Technical Achievements Would Seem As Supernatural To Us As Ours Would Seem To A Dark Age Peasant Transported To The Twenty-first Century. Imagine His Response To A Laptop Computer, A Mobile Telephone, A Hydrogen Bomb Or A Jumbo Jet.

Evolution Never Looks To The Future.

Looking To The Future

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

Even If It Were True That We Need God To Be Moral, It Would Of Course Not Make God's Existence More Likely, Merely More Desirable (many People Cannot Tell The Difference)

Mutation Is Random; Natural Selection Is The Very Opposite Of Random.

I Do Believe That Nice Religious People Make The World Safe For Extremists By Teaching Us [...] That Faith Is A Virtue, Teaching Us That There's Something Good About Holding Beliefs Without Any Substantiating Evidence. Once You Buy Into That, [...] Then The Door Is Opened To Extremists Who Defend Their Extremism By Saying, 'oh Well, It's My Faith, You Can't Touch It, You Can't Criticise My Faith, I Don't Even Need To Defend It Because Faith Is Faith.'

There Could Be Something Incredibly Grand And Incomprehensible And Beyond Our Present Understanding.

There Are All Sorts Of Things That Would Be Comforting. I Expect An Injection Of Morphine Would Be Comforting... But To Say That Something Is Comforting Is Not To Say That It's True.

It Would Be Really Worrying If, As A Darwinian, It Was Impossible To Think Of Ways In Which Our Behavior Could Be Explained.

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.

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.

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

People Who Criticize The Selfish Gene Like That Often Haven't Read It. The Selfish Gene Accounts For Altruism Toward Kin And Individuals Who Might Be In A Position To Reciprocate Your Altruism.

The Cynic About Human Nature Might Say That Religious Morality Is An Effective Way Of Keeping People In Line. The Threat Of Hell, The Reward Of Heaven, But The Rules Of The Holy Books Are Out Of Date And Often Barbaric.

Does Religion Fill A Much Needed Gap? It Is Often Said That There Is A God-shaped Gap In The Brain Which Needs To Be Filled: We Have A Psychological Need For God -- Imaginary Friend, Father, Big Brother, Confessor, Confidant -- And The Need Has To Be Satisfied Whether God Really Exists Or Not. But Could It Be That God Clutters Up A Gap That We'd Be Better Off Filling With Something Else? Science, Perhaps? Art? Human Friendship? Humanism? Love Of This Life In The Real World, Giving No Credence To Other Lives Beyond The Grave?

…the Genesis Story Is Just One That Happened To Have Been Adopted By One Particular Tribe Of Middle Eastern Herders. It Has No More Special Status Than The Belief Of A Particular West African Tribe That The World Was Created From The Excrement Of Ants.

But Perhaps The Rest Of Us Could Have Separate Classes In Science Appreciation, The Wonder Of Science, Scientific Ways Of Thinking, And The History Of Scientific Ideas, Rather Than Laboratory Experience.

I Don't Shout People Down. I Argue People Down, Perhaps.

At The Deepest Level, All Living Things That Have Ever Been Looked At Have The Same Dna Code. And Many Of The Same Genes.

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.

Time And Again, My Sociobiological Colleagues Have Upbraided Me As A Turncoat, Because I Will Not Agree With Them That The Ultimate Criterion For The Success Of A Meme Must Be Its Contribution To Darwinian "fitness". At Bottom, They Insist, A "good Meme" Spreads Because Brains Are Receptive To It, And The Receptiveness Of Brains Is Ultimately Shaped By (genetic) Natural Selection.

I Think What I'd Really Like To See Would Be A Mass Consciousness-raising Movement So That We Would All Become Vegetarian.

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

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.

Nothing Is Wrong With Peace And Love. It Is All The More Regrettable That So Many Of Christ's Followers Seem To Disagree.

Darwin Gives Courage To The Rest Of Science That We Shall End Up Understanding Literally Everything, Springing From Almost Nothing - A Thought Extremely Hard To Comprehend And Believe.

You Can Never Be Absolutely Certain That Anything Doesn't Exist. But You Can Show That It's Unlikely.

The Distribution Of Species On Islands And Continents Throughout The World Is Exactly What You'd Expect If Evolution Was A Fact. The Distribution Of Fossils In Space And In Time Are Exactly What You Would Expect If Evolution Were A Fact. There Are Millions Of Facts All Pointing In The Same Direction And No Facts Pointing In The Wrong Direction.

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.

Leaders Who Forbid Their Followers To Use Effective Contraceptive Methods Express A Preference For "natural" Methods Of Population Limitation, And A Natural Method Is Exactly What They Are Going To Get. It Is Called Starvation.

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.

I Do Think Imagination Is Enormously Valuable, And That Children Should Be Encouraged In Their Imagination. That's Very True.

If You Divide Christians Into Denominations, Agnostics And Atheists Come In Third, Behind Catholics And Baptists. That's Interesting When You Contrast It With The Lack Of Influence Of Nonbelievers.

A Retaliator Behaves Like A Hawk When He Is Attacked By A Hawk, And Like A Dove When He Meets A Dove. When He Meets Another Retaliator He Plays Like A Dove. A Retaliator Is A Conditional Strategist. His Behaviour Depends On The Behaviour Of His Opponent.

The Illusion Of Design Is So Successful That To This Day Most Americans (including, Significantly, Many Influential And Rich Americans) Stubbornly Refuse To Believe It Is An Illusion.

It's Very Important To Try To Inculcate Into Children Moral Rules, Such As "do As You Would Be Done By."

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

Objective Truth

Religion Is A Powerful Weapon That Can Be Used Because It Persuades People To Do Things. And Thus It Can Be Used For Good Or Ill. But It Should Not Be A Powerful Weapon At All.

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

Thought Provoking

What Really Happens Is That The Gene Pool Becomes Filled With Genes That Influence Bodies In Such A Way That They Behave 'as If' They Made Complex, If Unconscious, Cost/benefit Calculations

As Long As We Accept The Principle That Religious Faith Must Be Respected Simply Because It Is Religious Faith, It Is Hard To Withhold Respect From The Faith Of Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers

I Mean It As A Compliment When I Say That You Could Almost Define A Philosopher As Someone Who Won't Take Common Sense For An Answer.

All The Great Religions Have A Place For Awe, For Ecstatic Transport At The Wonder And Beauty Of Creation.

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

Evolution Could So Easily Be Disproved If Just A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Date Order. Evolution Has Passed This Test With Flying Colours.

The Universe Is A Strange And Wondrous Place. The Truth Is Quite Odd Enough To Need No Help From Pseudoscientific Charlatans.

I Don't Know What To Think About Magic And Fairy Tales.

If Children Understand That Beliefs Should Be Substantiated With Evidence, As Opposed To Tradition, Authority, Revelation Or Faith, They Will Automatically Work Out For Themselves That They Are Atheists.

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 Believe That An Orderly Universe, One Indifferent To Human Preoccupations, In Which Everything Has An Explanation Even If We Still Have A Long Way To Go Before We Find It, Is A More Beautiful, More Wonderful Place Than A Universe Tricked Out With Capricious Ad Hoc Magic.

The Genetic Code Is Not A Binary Code As In Computers, Nor An Eight-level Code As In Some Telephone Systems, But A Quaternary Code With Four Symbols. The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computerlike.

Religion Is About Turning Untested Belief Into Unshakable Truth Through The Power Of Institutions And The Passage Of Time.

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?

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.

Segregation Has No Place In The Education System.

Education System

I Don't Understand Why So Many People Who Are Sophisticated In Science Go On Believing In God. I Wish I Did.

It Is Absolutely Safe To Say That If You Meet Somebody Who Claims Not To Believe In Evolution, That Person Is Ignorant, Stupid Or Insane (or Wicked, But I'd Rather Not Consider That).

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.

I Think That [paul] Bloom's Approach - And Others Who Take It - Is Not So Much That There Is A Precise Genetic Basis To Faith. But There Is A Genetic Basis To A Psychological Predisposition That Manifests Itself As Faith And Religion Under The Right Conditions.

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'.

I Have Never Quite Understood - And This Is No Doubt My Failing - I Never Quite Understood Why You Would Read Fiction To Understand The Human Condition.

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.

When I Say That Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines, One Shouldn't Put Too Much Emphasis On The Word 'just.' There Is A Very Great Deal Of Complication, And Indeed Beauty In Being A Gene Machine.

By Being Outside Of Nature, God Is Also Outside Of Space And Time.

If You Don't Understand How Something Works, Never Mind: Just Give Up And Say God Did It. You Don't Know How The Nerve Impulse Works? Good! You Don't Understand How Memories Are Laid Down In The Brain? Excellent! Is Photosynthesis A Bafflingly Complex Process? Wonderful! Please Don't Go To Work On The Problem, Just Give Up, And Appeal To God.

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.

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.

I Think The Probability Of A Supernatural Creator Existing Is Very Very Low.

I Have Found It An Amusing Strategy, When Asked Whether I Am An Atheist, To Point Out That The Questioner Is Also An Atheist When Considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, The Golden Calf And The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I Just Go One God Further.

I Think I Would Abolish Schools Which Systematically Inculcate Sectarian Beliefs.

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.

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority.

The Take-home Message Is That We Should Blame Religion Itself, Not Religious Extremism - As Though That Were Some Kind Of Terrible Perversion Of Real, Decent Religion. Voltaire Got It Right Long Ago: 'those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.' So Did Bertrand Russell: 'many People Would Sooner Die Than Think. In Fact They Do.

I Guess There Are Some Rights Of Parents With What They Choose Their Children To Learn, But I'm Biased In Favor Of Freeing Children To Learn And Not Letting Parents Be Too Doctrinaire In Indoctrinating Their Children.

You Can't Blame Science For Being Used For Evil Purposes. What You Can Do Is Say, 'this Is An Exceedingly Powerful Tool.' And You Want To Make Sure It Is Used For Good Purposes, Not Bad Ones. That Is A Political Decision.

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."

Religious People Are Atheists About All Other Gods, Atheists Only Take It One God Further.

The History Of Science Has Been One Long Series Of Violent Brainstorms, As Successive Generations Have Come To Terms With Increasing Levels Of Queerness In The Universe.

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

Although Atheism Might Have Been Logically Tenable Before Darwin, Darwin Made It Possible To Be An Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist.

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.

Religion And Science Have Nothing To Do With Each Other, They're About Different Things, Science Is About The Way The World Works And Religion Is About [...] Miracles. [...] And In Any Case, If You Ask Most Ordinary People In Church Or In A Mosque Why They Believe, It's Almost Certainly Got Something To Do With The Belief That God Does Wonderful Things, That God Intervenes, That God Heals The Sick, That God Answers Prayers, God Forgives Sins.

I Do Not Believe There Is An Atheist In The World Who Would Bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster Or Notre Dame, The Shwe Dagon, The Temples Of Kyoto Or, Of Course, The Buddhas Of Bamiyan.

We Have To Find Our Own Purposes In Life, Which Are Not Derived Directly From Our Scientific History.

Purpose Of Life

Why Do More Than 40 Percent Of Americans Think That The Universe Began After The Domestication Of The Dog?

Biology Is The Study Of Complicated Things That Give The Appearance Of Having Been Designed For A Purpose

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?

‎"matter Flows From Place To Place, And Momentarily Comes Together To Be You. Some People Find That Thought Disturbing; I Find The Reality Thrilling.

Are Science And Religion Converging? No. There Are Modern Scientists Whose Words Sound Religious But Whose Beliefs, On Close Examination, Turn Out To Be Identical To Those Of Other Scientists Who Straightforwardly Call Themselves Atheists.

There Does Seem To Be A Sense In Which Physics Has Gone Beyond What Human Intuition Can Understand. We Shouldn't Be Too Surprised About That Because We're Evolved To Understand Things That Move At A Medium Pace At A Medium Scale. We Can't Cope With The Very Tiny Scale Of Quantum Physics Or The Very Large Scale Of Relativity.

A Gene Might Be Able To Assist Replicas Of Itself That Are Sitting In Other Bodies. If So, This Would Appear As Individual Altruism But It Would Be Brought About By Gene Selfishness.

The Thing That Defines A Species Is That All Members Have The Same Addressing System For Their Dna.

Everybody Is An Atheist In Saying That There Is A God - From Ra To Shiva - In Which He Does Not Believe. All That The Serious And Objective Atheist Does Is To Take The Next Step And To Say That There Is Just One More God To Disbelieve In.

I Great Difficulty Having Any Respect For A Religion That Has So Little Confidence In The Truth Of Its Beliefs That It Feels Reduced To Using Threats In Order To Propagate Those Beliefs.

Beliefs. Once Entrenched In A Culture, They Persist, Evolve And Diverge, In A Manner Reminiscent Of Biological Evolution.

To Invoke The Origin Of The Dna/protein Machine By Invoking A Supernatural Designer Is To Explain Precisely Nothing - For It Leaves Unexplained The Origin Of The Designer.

The Atheist View Is Correspondingly Life-affirming And Life-enhancing, While At The Same Time Never Being Tainted With Self-delusion, Wishful Thinking, Or The Whingeing Self-pity Of Those Who Feel That Life Owes Them Something.

That Was Unfortunate. I Should Have Compared Religion With Religion And Compared Islam Not With Trinity College But With Jews, Because The Number Of Jews Who Have Won Nobel Prizes Is Phenomenally High.

There's A Natural Tendency For Children To, In Some Sense, Inherit The Cultural Values Of Their Parents. I'm Not Against That, That's Fine, That's Wonderful. What I Am Against Is Labelling. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Cricketer Because His Father Is A Cricketer, But They Do Label A Child A Catholic Because His Parents Are Catholic. I Think It's More Or Less Unique. Nobody Ever Labels A Child A Socialist Or A Conservative Or A Liberal Because That's What Their Parents Are.

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.

Evolution Is A Very, Very Important Idea. It Is The Explanation For All Of Life - A Stunningly Simple, Yet Powerful Explanation. If You Think About It, Before Darwin, We Hadn't The Foggiest Idea Of How We Came Into Being. Now We Do. It's Still Such An Exciting Idea That It Is Well Worth Everybody Understanding It.

There May Be Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden. There Is No Evidence For It, But You Can't Prove That There Aren't Any, So Shouldn't We Be Agnostic With Respect To Fairies?

Science May Be Weird And Incomprehensible--more Weird And Less Comprehensible Than Any Theology--but Science Works. It Gets Results. It Can Fly You To Saturn, Slingshotting You Around Venus And Jupiter On The Way. We May Not Understand Quantum Theory (heaven Knows, I Don't), But A Theory That Predicts The Real World To Ten Decimal Places Cannot In Any Straightforward Sense Be Wrong.

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

Writing A Computer Virus Program Is Child's Play. Any Fool Can Do It, Which Is Why The Silly Little Twerps Who Do Have Nothing To Be Proud Of.

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.

I've Never Heard Of William Craig. A Debate With Him Might Look Good On His Resume, But It Wouldn't Look Good On Mine!

Certainly Science Should Continue To See Whether We Can Find Evidence For Multiverses That Might Explain Why Our Own Universe Seems To Be So Finely Tuned.

Do Humans Have A Different Moral Significance Than Cows In General?

Why, I Can't Help Wondering, Is God Thought To Need Such Ferocious Defence? One Might Have Supposed Him Amply Capable Of Looking After Himself.

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.

No Educated Person Believes The Adam And Eve Myth Nowadays, But It's Surprising How Many Parents Think That It's Somehow Fun To Pass On This Falsehood To Their Children...i Would Want To Argue That The Truth Of Evolution Is More Interesting And More Poetic

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

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.

If We Want To Know Where The Truth Lies In Particular Cases, We Have To Look.

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.

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.

If We Are Too Friendly To Nice, Decent Bishops, We Run The Risk Of Buying Into The Fiction That There's Something Virtuous About Believing Things Because Of Faith Rather Than Because Of Evidence. We Run The Risk Of Betraying Scientific Enlightenment.

I Had Always Been Scrupulously Careful To Avoid The Smallest Suggestion Of Infant Indoctrination, Which I Think Is Ultimately Responsible For Much Of The Evil In The World. Others, Less Close To Her, Showed No Such Scruples, Which Upset Me, As I Very Much Wanted Her, As I Want All Children, To Make Up Her Own Mind Freely When She Became Old Enough To Do So. I Would Encourage Her To Think, Without Telling Her What To Think.

If We Say That Religion Is A Virus, Then Why Isn't Science A Virus?

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

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.

Words Are Our Servants, Not Our Masters. For Different Purposes, We Find It Convenient To Use Words In Different Senses.

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.

Humans Have More Moral Responsibility Perhaps, Because They Are Capable Of Reasoning.

Our Brains Have Evolved To Help Us Survive Within The Orders Of Magnitude Of Size And Speed Which Our Bodies Operate At. We Never Evolved To Navigate In The World Of Atoms.

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.

Or Why It Is Acceptable To Train Fast Runners And High Jumpers But Not To Breed Them. I Can Think Of Some Answers, And They Are Good Ones, Which Would Probably End Up Persuading Me. But Hasn't The Time Come When We Should Stop Being Frightened Even To Put The Question?

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life.

I Would Like To Find A Way In Which People In Saudi Arabia Could Learn That They Can Be Something Other Than A Muslim. Some People May Not Realize This. Of Course, There Is The Problem That You Can Get In Trouble Or Get Stoned.

I Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

God Exists, If Only In The Form Of A Meme With High Survival Value, Or Infective Power, In The Environment Provided By Human Culture.

Some People Find Clarity Threatening. They Like Muddle, Confusion, Obscurity. So When Somebody Does No More Than Speak Clearly It Sounds Threatening.

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

When I Sign Books, I Get Lines Of People And What They Usually Say Is: "thank You. You Have Changed My Life." I Am Really Moved By That.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

By Dislaiming The Idea Of A Next Life, We Can Take More Excitement In This One!

Life Results From The Non-random Survival Of Randomly Varying Replicators. The Watchmaker Is Blind

Who Are We To Say That That Was An Odd Way To Do It? I Don't Think That It Is God's Purpose To Make His Intention Absolutely Obvious To Us.

Why Did God Make Tigers So Good At Catching Prey, And At The Same Time Make Prey So Good At Getting Away From Tigers? You'd Think That If God Wanted One Thing Or The Other To Happen He'd Have Engineered It Rather Better. Maybe He Enjoyed The Spectator Sport?

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.

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 Have A Faith, It Is Statistically Overwhelmingly Likely That It Is The Same Faith As Your Parents And Grandparents Had. No Doubt Soaring Cathedrals, Stirring Music, Moving Stories And Parables, Help A Bit. But By Far The Most Important Variable Determining Your Religion Is The Accident Of Birth. The Convictions That You So Passionately Believe Would Have Been A Completely Different, And Largely Contradictory, Set Of Convictions, If Only You Had Happened To Be Born In A Different Place.

We Should Take Astrology Seriously. No, I Don't Mean We Should Believe In It. I Am Talking About Fighting It Seriously Instead Of Humouring It As A Piece Of Harmless Fun.

Religion Is Not The Root Of All Evil, For No One Thing Is The Root Of All Anything.

When Two Opposite Points Of View Are Expressed With Equal Intensity, The Truth Does Not Necessarily Lie Exactly Half Way Between. It Is Possible For One Side Simply To Be Wrong.

There's Nothing Nonsensical About Saying That What Would Evolve If Darwinian Selection Has Its Head Is Something That You Don't Want To Happen. And I Could Easily Imagine Trying To Go Against Darwinism.

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!

Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

What Lies At The Heart Of Every Living Thing Is Not A Fire, Not Warm Breath, Not A 'spark Of Life.' It Is Information, Words, Instructions... If You Want To Understand Life, Don't Think About Vibrant, Throbbing Gels And Oozes, Think About Information Technology.

I Would Challenge The Statement That My Scientific Instincts Are Any Less Rigorous Than [richard Dawkins]. The Difference Is That My Presumption Of The Possibility Of God And Therefore The Supernatural Is Not Zero, And Yours Is.

I'm Fond Of Science Fiction. But Not All Science Fiction.

Science Fiction

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.

The Resemblance Of The Signs Of The Zodiac To The Animals After Which They Are Named... Is As Unimpressive As The Predictions Of Astrologers.

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

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

Individuals Are Not Stable Things, They Are Fleeting. Chromosomes Too Are Shuffled Into Oblivion, Like Hands Of Cards Soon After They Are Dealt. But The Cards Themselves Survive The Shuffling. The Cards Are The Genes. The Genes Are Not Destroyed By Crossing-over, They Merely Change Partners And March On. Of Course They March On. That Is Their Business. They Are The Replicators And We Are Their Survival Machines. When We Have Served Our Purpose We Are Cast Aside. But Genes Are Denizens Of Geological Time: Genes Are Forever.

I Think Looking Back To My Own Childhood, The Fact That So Many Of The Stories I Read Allowed The Possibility Of Frogs Turning Into Princes, Whether That Has A Sort Of Insidious Affect On Rationality, I'm Not Sure. Perhaps It's Something For Research.

You Can't Statistically Explain Improbable Things Like Living Creatures By Saying That They Must Have Been Designed Because You're Still Left To Explain The Designer, Who Must Be, If Anything, An Even More Statistically Improbable And Elegant Thing.

The Theory Of Evolution By Cumulative Natural Selection Is The Only Theory We Know Of That Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining The Existence Of Organized Complexity.

Theory Of Evolution

Trending Author

Kenneth H. Cooper

Category