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We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

-Richard Dawkins

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We Have The Same

Richard Dawkins

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We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

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I Think The Written Word Is Probably The Best Medium Of Communication Because You Have Time To Reflect, You Have Time To Choose Your Words, To Get Your Sentences Exactly Right. Whereas When You're Being Interviewed, Say, You Have To Talk On The Fly, You Have To Improvise, You Can Change Sentences Around, And They're Not Exactly Right.

I Hope Nobody Is Seriously Suggesting That We Get Our Morals From Scripture Because If We Did We'd Be Stoning People For Working On The Sabbath Or Switching On A Light On The Sabbath. So The Point Is That You Can Find Good Bits Of The Bible But You Have To Cherry-pick, You Have Reject The Nasty Bits And Pick The Nice Bits.

...it Is A Telling Fact That, The World Over, The Vast Majority Of Children Follow The Religion Of Their Parents Rather Than Any Of The Other Available Religions.

The Virgin Birth, The Resurrection, The Raising Of Lazarus, Even The Old Testament Miracles, All Are Freely Used For Religious Propaganda, And They Are Very Effective With An Audience Of Unsophisticates And Children

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.

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.

I Think That There Are Good Things That Happen And Bad Things That Happen.

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.

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.

The God Of The Old Testament Is Arguably The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction: Jealous And Proud Of It; A Petty, Unjust, Unforgiving Control-freak; A Vindictive, Bloodthirsty Ethnic Cleanser; A Misogynistic, Homophobic, Racist, Infanticidal, Genocidal, Filicidal, Pestilential, Megalomaniacal, Sadomasochistic, Capriciously Malevolent Bully.

I Do Think The Roman Catholic Religion Is A Disease Of The Mind Which Has A Particular Epidemiology Similar To That Of A Virus... Religion Is A Terrific Meme. That's Right. But That Doesn't Make It True And I Care About What's True. Smallpox Virus Is A Terrific Virus. It Does Its Job Magnificently Well. That Doesn't Mean That It's A Good Thing. It Doesn't Mean That I Don't Want To See It Stamped Out.

Bush And Bin Laden Are Really On The Same Side: The Side Of Faith And Violence Against The Side Of Reason And Discussion. Both Have Implacable Faith That They Are Right And The Other Is Evil. Each Believes That When He Dies He Is Going To Heaven. Each Believes That If He Could Kill The Other, His Path To Paradise In The Next World Would Be Even Swifter. The Delusional "next World" Is Welcome To Both Of Them. This World Would Be A Much Better Place Without Either Of Them.

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.

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.

Evolution Is A Theory In A Special Philosophical Sense Of Science, But In Terms Of Ordinary Laymen's Use Of Language, It's A Fact, .. Evolution Is A Fact In The Same Sense That It's A Fact That The Earth Is Round And Not Flat, [that] The Earth Goes Round The Sun. Both Those Are Also Theories, But They're Theories That Have Never Been Disproved And Never Will Be Disproved.

The Physicist's Problem Is The Problem Of Ultimate Origins And Ultimate Natural Laws. The Biologist's Problem Is The Problem Of Complexity.

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 Popularity Of The Paranormal, Oddly Enough, Might Even Be Grounds For Encouragement. I Think That The Appetite For Mystery, The Enthusiasm For That Which We Do Not Understand, Is Healthy And To Be Fostered. It Is The Same Appetite Which Drives The Best Of True Science, And It Is An Appetite Which True Science Is Best Qualified To Satisfy.

Maybe Scientists Are Fundamentalist When It Comes To Defining In Some Abstract Way What Is Meant By 'truth'. But So Is Everybody Else. I Am No More Fundamentalist When I Say Evolution Is True Than When I Say It Is True That New Zealand Is In The Southern Hemisphere. We Believe In Evolution Because The Evidence Supports It, And We Would Abandon It Overnight If New Evidence Arose To Disprove It.

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.

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

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.

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.

Even If Not A Single Fossil Has Ever Been Found, The Evidence From Surviving Animals Would Still Overwhelmingly Force The Conclusion That Darwin Was Right.

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.

[invading Iraq] Will Unite The Entire Arab World Against The West.

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.

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

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

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

But What, After All, Is Faith? It Is A State Of Mind That Leads People To Believe Something - It Doesn't Matter What - In The Total Absence Of Supporting Evidence. If There Were Good Supporting Evidence Then Faith Would Be Superfluous, For The Evidence Would Compel Us To Believe It Anyway. It Is This That Makes The Often-parroted Claim That 'evolution Itself Is A Matter Of Faith' So Silly. People Believe In Evolution Not Because They Arbitrarily Want To Believe It But Because Of Overwhelming, Publicly Available Evidence.

We Have This One Life, Let's Enjoy It, Let's Live It To The Full And Don't Get So Worked Up About Don't Identify Yourself So Passionately With This Business Called Religion.

It Is Fashionable To Wax Apocalyptic About The Threat To Humanity Posed By The Aids Virus, "mad Cow" Disease, And Many Others, But I Think A Case Can Be Made That Faith Is One Of The World's Great Evils, Comparable To The Smallpox Virus But Harder To Eradicate.

Mad Cow Disease

I Suspect The Reason Is That Most People [...] Have A Residue Of Feeling That Darwinian Evolution Isn't Quite Big Enough To Explain Everything About Life. All I Can Say As A Biologist Is That The Feeling Disappears Progressively The More You Read About And Study What Is Known About Life And Evolution. I Want To Add One Thing More. The More You Understand The Significance Of Evolution, The More You Are Pushed Away From The Agnostic Position And Towards Atheism. Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

[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.

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?

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.

I Think There Could Be A Very Large Number Who Are Creationists By Default. Those Are The People I Want To Reach.

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

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.

Good And Evil - I Don't Believe That There Is Hanging Out There, Anywhere, Something Called Good And Something Called Evil.

I Would, Like Any Other Scientist, Willingly Change My Mind If The Evidence Led Me To Do So. So I Care About What's True, I Care About Evidence, I Care About Evidence As The Reason For Knowing What Is True. It Is True That I Come Across Rather Passionate Sometimes - And That's Because I Am Passionate About The Truth... I Do Get Very Impatient With Humbug, With Cant, With Fakery, With Charlatans.

Not Only Is Science Corrosive To Religion, But Religion Is Corrosive To Science. It Teaches People To Be Satisfied With Trivial Non-explanations And Blinds Them To The Wonderful Real Explanations That We Have Within Our Grasp.

If It's Really True, That The Museum At Liberty University Has Dinosaur Fossils Which Are Labelled As Being 3000 Years Old, Then That Is An Educational Disgrace. It Is Debauching The Whole Idea Of A University, And I Would Strongly Encourage Any Members Of Liberty University Who May Be Here To Leave And Go To A Proper University.

There Is Something Infantile In The Presumption That Somebody Else Has A Responsibility To Give Your Life Meaning And Point… The Truly Adult View, By Contrast, Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It.

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

Many People Want To Send Their Children To Faith Schools Because They Get Good Exam Results, But They're Not Foolish Enough To Believe That It's Because Of Faith That They Get Good Exam Results.

Science Boosts Its Claim To Truth By Its Spectacular Ability To Make Matter And Energy Jump Through Hoops On Command, And To Predict What Will Happen And When.

[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've Seen [lalla Ward] Episodes Of "doctor Who." They're Good, At Least Partly Because The Scripts Were Written By Douglas Adams.

However Brief Our Time In The Sun, If We Waste A Second Of It, Or Complain That It Is Dull Or Barren Or (like A Child) Boring, Couldn't This Be Seen As A Callous Insult To Those Unborn Trillions Who Will Never Even Be Offered Life In The First Place?

We Should Learn To Understand Natural Selection, So That We Can Oppose Any Tendency To Apply It To Human Politics.

If You Listen To Two People Who Are Arguing About Something, And They Each Of Them Have Passionate Faith That They're Right, But They Believe Different Things---they Belong To Different Religions, Different Faiths, There Is Nothing They Can Do To Settle Their Disagreement Short Of Shooting Each Other, Which Is What They Very Often Actually Do.

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.

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

Scientists Can Have Their Judgment Clouded By Their Professional Aspirations. And The Pure Truth Of Faith, Which You Can Think Of As This Clear Spiritual Water, Is Poured Into Rusty Vessels Called Human Beings, And So Sometimes The Benevolent Principles Of Faith Can Get Distorted As Positions Are Hardened.

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.

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.

Though The Details Differ Across The World, No Known Culture Lacks Some Version Of The Time-consuming, Wealth Consuming, Hostility Provoking Rituals, The Anti-factual, Counter-productive Fantasies Of Religion.

Human Beings Are Just Gene Machines.

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.

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 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.

Blindness To Suffering Is An Inherent Consequence Of Natural Selection. Nature Is Neither Kind Nor Cruel But Indifferent.

If You Are Offended By Reading Views That Disagree With Yours, Then Yes, You Will Be Offended. However, It Is Not Gratuitously Offensive, It Simply Puts An Argument, And If Your Views Are Strong Enough, As I Believe They Are, You Will Be Able To Defend Your Views. You Will Not Say, "oh, It's Offensive, It's Offensive." You Will Say "no, You Are Wrong Here And You Are Wrong Here," And That's What You Should Do.

Some Sort Of Belief In All-powerful Supernatural Beings Is Common, If Not Universal. A Tendency To Obey Authority, Perhaps Especially In Children, A Tendency To Believe What You're Told, A Tendency To Fear Your Own Death, A Tendency To Wish To See Your Loved Ones Who Have Died, To Wish To See Them Again, A Wish To Understand Where You Came From, Where The World Came From, All These Psychological Predispositions, Under The Right Cultural Conditions, Tend To Lead To People Believing In Things For Which There Is No Evidence.

Evolution Is Not A Genetically Controlled Distortion Of One Adult Form Into Another; It Is A Genetically Controlled Alteration In A Developmental Program.

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.

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).

Be Thankful That You Have A Life, And Forsake Your Vain And Presumptuous Desire For A Second One.

The Idea That God Could Only Forgive Our Sins By Having His Son Tortured To Death As A Scapegoat Is Surely, From An Objective Point Of View, A Deeply Unpleasant Idea. If God Wanted To Forgive Us Our Sins, Why Didn't He Just Forgive Them? Why Did He Have To Have His Son Tortured?

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

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

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

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.

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

Most People, I Believe, Think That You Need A God To Explain The Existence Of The World, And Especially The Existence Of Life. They Are Wrong, But Our Education System Is Such That Many People Don't Know It.

I Think We Don't Do A Service To Dialogue Between Science And Faith To Characterize Sincere People By Calling Them Names. That Inspires An Even More Dug-in Position.

The Whole Of Technology Depends On A Scientific Background, And Of Course Technology Can Be Used For Evil Purposes. You Can't Blame Science For That.

It Is An Essential Part Of The Scientific Enterprise To Admit Ignorance, Even To Exult In Ignorance As A Challenge To Future Conquests.

Pope Francis Seems To Be A Much Nicer Man Than Pope Benedict, But I'm Not Sure That His Views On Things That Really Matter Are All That Different. Whereas Benedict Was Perhaps A Wolf In Wolf's Clothing, Francis Is Perhaps A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing.

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

I Do Disapprove Very Strongly Of Labelling Children, Especially Young Children, As Something Like 'catholic Children' Or 'protestant Children' Or 'islamic Children.'

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

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.

...i Am Not Attacking Any Particular God Or Gods. I Am Attacking God, All Gods, Anything And Everything Supernatural, Whenever Or Wherever They Have Been Or Will Be Invented.

Anything And Everything

We Accept That People Are Irrational For Good Darwinian Reasons. But I Don't Think We Should Be So Pessimistic As To Think That Therefore We're Forever Condemned To Be Irrational.

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

I'm Not Much Given To Straight, Irony-free Hero-worship.

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 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.

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

I Am Passionate About Truth And Passionate About Clarity, And I Don't Regard Myself As Particularly Militant Or Aggressive. I Simply Wish To Discuss What Is True And To Listen To Evidence And Put Evidence Forward To Other People And Have A Sensible, Sane, Moderated Argument.

I Remember At The Age Of Six Regaling My Poor Little Sister With Stories About The Planets, And How Far Away They Were And Which Ones Might Have Life.

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

Bertrand Russell Used A Hypothetical Teapot In Orbit About Mars For The Same Didactic Purpose. You Have To Be Agnostic About The Teapot, But That Doesn't Mean You Treat The Likelihood Of Its Existence As Being On All Fours With Its Non-existence.

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.

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

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

Thought Provoking

I Became A Little Alarmed At The Number Of My Readers Who Took The Meme More Positively As A Theory Of Human Culture In Its Own Right - Either To Criticize It (unfairly, Given My Original Modest Intention) Or To Carry It Far Beyond The Limits Of What I Then Thought Justified. This Was Why I May Have Seemed To Backtrack.

As My Colleague, The Physical Chemist Peter Atkins, Puts It, We Must Be Equally Agnostic About The Theory That There Is A Teapot In Orbrit Around The Planet Pluto. We Can't Disprove It. But That Doesn't Mean The Theory That There Is A Teapot Is On Level Terms With The Theory That There Isn't.

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

We Are Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones. Most People Are Never Going To Die Because They Are Never Going To Be Born. The Potential People Who Could Have Been Here In My Place But Who Will In Fact Never See The Light Of Day Outnumber The Sand Grains Of Sahara.

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.

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

To Illustrate The Vain Conceit That The Universe Must Be Somehow Pre-ordained For Us, Because We Are So Well-suited To Live In It, He [douglas Adams] Mimed A Wonderfully Funny Imitation Of A Puddle Of Water, Fitting Itself Snugly Into A Depression In The Ground, The Depression Uncannily Being Exactly The Same Shape As The Puddle.

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

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.

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

At Least The Fundamentalists Haven't Tried To Dilute Their Message. Their Faith Is Exposed For What It Is For All To See.

Show Me A Cultural Relativist At 30,000 Feet And I'll Show You A Hypocrite ... If You Are Flying To An International Congress Of Anthropologists Or Literary Critics, The Reason You Will Probably Get There - The Reason You Don't Plummet Into A Ploughed Field - Is That A Lot Of Western Scientifically Trained Engineers Have Got Their Sum Right.

I Personally Would Go Further And Say That, If Your Morality Is Based, As Mine Is, On A Desire To Increase The Sum Of Happiness And Reduce Suffering, The Decision To Deliberately Give Birth To A Down Baby, When You Have The Choice To Abort It Early In The Pregnancy, Might Actually Be Immoral From The Point Of View Of The Child’s Own Welfare.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular. I Suppose I Have To Say Politically I Would Like Religion To Become Gentler And Nicer And To Stop Interfering With Other People's Lives, Stop Repressing Women, Stop Indoctrinating Children, All That Sort Of Thing. But I Really, Really Would Like To See Religion Go Away Altogether.

All Animals Are Minor Variations On A Very Particular Theme.

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.

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.

It Is Possible In Medicine, Even When You Intend To Do Good, To Do Harm Instead. That Is Why Science Thrives On Actively Encouraging Criticism Rather Than Stifling It.

Religion Is The Most Inflammatory Enemy-labelling Device In History.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

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.

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.

Even If There Were No Actual Evidence In Favor Of The Darwinian Theory, We Should Still Be Justified In Preferring It Over All Rival Theories.

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

I Have Often Said That I Am A Passionate Darwinian When It Comes To Explaining Why We Exist.

There Is A Tendency For People To Say Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Inappropriate.

The Patient Typically Finds Himself Impelled By Some Deep, Inner Conviction That Something Is True, Or Right, Or Virtuous: A Conviction That Doesn't Seem To Owe Anything To Evidence Or Reason, But Which, Nevertheless, He Feels As Totally Compelling And Convincing. We Doctors Refer To Such A Belief As 'faith'.

If You Are Asking Me If My More Global Purpose Is A Battle Against Religion, It Is.

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.

Ideally, I'd Like Everybody To Be Secular.

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.

I Do Understand People When They Say That You Destroy The Magic Of Childhood If You Encourage Too Much Skeptical Questioning.

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

However Statistically Improbable The Entity You Seek To Explain By Invoking A Designer, The Designer Himself Has Got To Be At Least As Improbable. God Is The Ultimate Boeing 747

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

It Is All Too Easy To Mistake Passion That Can Change Its Mind For Fundamentalism, Which Never Will.

Science Is Wonderful, Science Is Important, And So Are Children, So Are Young People, And So What Could Be Better Than To Write A Science Book For Young People?

In The Case Of Stalinism, People Actually Distorted Science, Because It Was For The Good Of The Communist Party.

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

Much As We Might Wish To Believe Otherwise, Universal Love And The Welfare Of The Species As A Whole Are Concepts Which Simply Do Not Make Evolutionary Sense.

I Am Agnostic Only To The Extent That I Am Agnostic About Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

Whenever Conditions Arise In Which A New Kind Of Replicator Can Make Copies Of Itself, The New Replicators Will Tend To Take Over, And Start A New Kind Of Evolution Of Their Own. Once This New Evolution Begins, It Will In No Necessary Sense Be Subservient To The Old.

The Beauty Of Evolution Is That It Does Provide An Explanation Of How You Can Get Complexity Out Of Simplicity. It Does It By Slow, Gradual Degree. At No Point Are You Postulating The Sudden Coming Into Existence Of A Complicated Being.

The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain.

It's Known That Stress Gives Rise To Disease. It's Also Known That Many Diseases, Especially Stress-related Diseases, Can Be Cured By Placebos - Pills That Have No Medicinal Effect, But People Think They Do, And So They Do.

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.

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

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.

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

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.

It Is Almost As If The Human Brain Were Specifically Designed To Misunderstand Darwinism, And To Find It Hard To Believe

Creationists Are Possibly Gaining More Political Power. In The U.s., You Are Constantly Hearing Stories Of School Boards Harassing Teachers And Trying To Get Textbooks Banned.

I Detest 'jingle Bells,' 'white Christmas,' 'rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,' And The Obscene Spending Bonanza That Nowadays Seems To Occupy Not Just December, But November And Much Of October, Too.

The Chicken Is Only An Egg’s Way For Making Another Egg.

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.

If Your Plane Is Being Hijacked By An Armed Man Who, Though Prepared To Take Risks, Presumably Wants To Go On Living, There Is Room For Bargaining.

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 Find Many Of Answers In The Spiritual Realm. That In No Way Compromises My Ability To Think Rigorously As A Scientist.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

If You Look Up At The Milky Way Through The Eyes Of Carl Sagan, You Get A Feeling In Your Chest Of Something Greater Than Yourself. And It Is. But It's Not Supernatural.

I Am Very Hostile To Religion Because It Is Enormously Dominant, Especially In American Life. And I Don't Buy The Argument That, Well, It's Harmless. I Think It Is Harmful, Partly Because I Care Passionately About What's True.

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.

It Is Immoral To Brand Children With Religion. 'this Is A Catholic Child.' 'that Is A Muslim Child.' I Want Everyone To Flinch When They Hear Such A Phrase, Just As They Would If They Heard, 'that Is A Marxist Child.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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."

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

Religion Teaches The Dangerous Nonsense That Death Is Not The End.

It Is A Simple Logic Truth That, Short Of Mass Emigration Into Space, With Rockets Taking Off At The Rate Of Several Million Per Second, Uncontrolled Birth-rates Are Bound To Lead To Horribly Increased Death –rates. It Is Hard To Believe That This Simple Truth Is Not Understood By Those Leaders Who Forbid Their Followers To Use Effective Contraceptive Methods. They 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.

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.

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.

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.

I Once Wrote That Anybody Who Believes The World Is Only 6,000 Years Old Is Either Ignorant, Stupid, Insane Or Wicked.

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

I Am An Enthusiastic Darwinian, But I Think Darwinism Is Too Big A Theory To Be Confined To The Narrow Context Of The Gene.

Atheists Sometimes Come Across As A Bit Arrogant In This Regard, And Characterizing Faith As Something Only An Idiot Would Attach Themselves To.

There Is Something Wrong With Using Faith - Belief Without Evidence - As A Political Weapon. I Wouldn't Say There Is Something Similar About Using Science. Science - Or The Products Of Science Like Technology - Is Just A Way Of Achieving Something Real, Something That Happens, Something That Works.

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.

Religion Shows A Pattern Of Heredity Which I Think Is Similar To Genetic Heredity. ... There Are Hundreds Of Different Religious Sects, And Every Religious Person Is Loyal To Just One Of These. ... The Overwhelming Majority Just Happen To Choose The One Their Parents Belonged To. Not The Sect That Has The Best Evidence In Its Favour, The Best Miracles, The Best Moral Code, The Best Cathedral, The Best Stained-glass, The Best Music When It Comes To Choosing From The Smorgasbord Of Available Religions, Their Potential Virtues Seem To Count For Nothing Compared To The Matter Of Heredity.

Evolution Is Just A Theory? Well, So Is Gravity And I Don't See You Jumping Out Of Buildings.

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.

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.

People Sometimes Try To Score Debating Points By Saying, Evolution Is Only A Theory. That Is Correct, But It's Important To Understand What That Means. It Is Also Only A Theory That The World Goes Round The Sun - It's Just A Theory For Which There Is An Immense Amount Of Evidence. There Are Many Scientific Theories That Are In Doubt. Even Within Evolution, There Is Some Room For Controversy. But That We Are Cousins Of Apes And Jackals And Starfish, Let's Say, That Is A Fact In The Ordinary Sense Of The Word.

I'm Sure Obama Is An Atheist, I'm Sure Kennedy Was An Atheist, But I Doubt If Pope Frank Is.

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.

When We Talk About Genes For Anything, Like A Gene For Being Gay Or A Gene For Being Aggressive Or Something Of That Sort, That A Gene For Anything May Not Have Been A Gene For That Thing Under Different Environmental Conditions.

I Am At A Loss To Reconcile The Expensive And Glossy Production Values Of This Book With The Breathtaking Inanity Of The Content.

It Is Universally Accepted That An Admission Of Atheism Would Be Instant Political Suicide For Any (u.s.) Presidential Candidate.

I Suppose If You Look Back To Your Early Childhood You Accept Everything People Tell You, And That Includes A Heavy Dose Of Irrationality - You're Told About Tooth Fairies And Father Christmas And Things.

I Accept That There May Be Things Far Grander And More Incomprehensible Than We Can Possibly Imagine.

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.'

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.

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?

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