Citaten: Richard Dawkins on atheism and religion

[Bart Meerdink]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Misschien, in een deprimerende tijd waarin religieuze partijen de
meerderheid hebben in onze regering, we Wilders de aandacht geven die
elders zo veel beter besteed kan worden, en hier Muyz en Meet hun ego's
zo nodig weer uitgebreid moeten oppoetsen ten koste van deze lijst, is
dit stof tot nadenken: hoe religie onze wereld onveiliger maakt.

Bart Meerdink

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/dawkins.htm

Positive Atheism's Big List of Richard Dawkins Quotations

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
East African-born British Zoologist; the Charles Simonyi Professor for
the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New
College; Fellow of The Royal Society

Richard DawkinsAn 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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 6

A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons
of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He
will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible
to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he
though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though
strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more
probable than the Tooth Fairy's.
      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.
      The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic
doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If
you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or
tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you
believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not.
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and
a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so.
-- Richard Dawkins, following a list of excerpts from hate mail sent to
the editor of Freethought Today, after she won a separationist court
battle, in "A Challenge To Atheists: Come Out of the Closet" (Free
Inquiry, Summer, 2002) paragraph division added †â€

Perhaps the best of the available euphemisms for atheist is nontheist.
It lacks the connotation of positive conviction that there is definitely
no god, and it could therefore easily be embraced by Teapot or Tooth
Fairy Agnostics. It is less familiar than atheist and lacks its phobic
connotations. Yet, unlike a completely new coining, its meaning is
clear. If we want a euphemism at all, nontheist is probably the best.
      The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and
grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a
taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be
harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if
we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact
would be all the greater.
-- Richard Dawkins, following a list of excerpts from hate mail sent to
the editor of Freethought Today, after she won a separationist court
battle, in "A Challenge To Atheists: Come Out of the Closet" (Free
Inquiry, Summer, 2002) †â€

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our
brains drop out.
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not
understanding the world.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think
and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because
of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity,
to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against
fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them
straight to heaven.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life
highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place,
just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other
extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are
convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to
pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another
universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if
they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from
the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed,
if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any
wonder that naïve and frustrated young men are clamouring to be
selected for suicide missions?
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

My last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke
and choking dust of September 11th 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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Humanist, Vol. 57, No. 1

To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as
contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so
hostile to organized religion.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the
problem.
      We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world,
and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we
explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs
together down to an ultimately simple world.
      Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be
simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Nick Pollard interviews Richard Dawkins" (Damars:
1999) †â€

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.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)

[Excerpt (of sorts)]
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing
but blind pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995),
quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)

[Passage (if you will)]
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond
all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose
this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others
are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly
being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds
are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there
ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an
increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and
misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind
physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get
hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme
or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no
design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," published in Scientific
American (November, 1995), p. 85

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Nick Pollard interviews Richard Dawkins" (Damars:
1999) †â€

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, in Lanny Swerdlow, "My Sort Interview with Richard
Dawkins" (Portland, Oregon, 1996)

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).
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted from Josh Gilder, a creationist, in his
critical review, "PBS's 'Evolution' series is propaganda, not science"
(September, 2001)

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at
least once.
-- Richard Dawkins, The New Yorker, "Richard Dawkins's Evolution"
(September 9, 1996), debating "Does God Exist?" with Rabbi Adin
Steinsaltz, as reported by Ian Parker, quoted from The Columbia
Dictionary of Quotations

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is
science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those
scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do
science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and
resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized
ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake
of reason and sanity. Of course, excellent organizations already exist
for raising funds and deploying them in service of reason, science and
enlightenment values…But the money that these organizations can raise
is dwarfed by the huge resources of religious foundations such as the
Templeton Foundation, not to mention the tithe-bloated, tax-exempt churches.
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted from the press release, “The Cydonia Group
Declares War On Religion” (December 15, 2006)

      ... Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better
seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But
today I want to present it as something different again, and even
more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds
in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days,
and I mean very old days indeed.
      ...
      What changes is the long programs that natural selection has
written using those 64 basic words. The messages that have come down to
us are the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions, of generations. For every successful message that has reached
the present, countless failures have fallen away like the chippings on a
sculptor's floor. That's what Darwinian natural selection means. We are
the descendants of a tiny élite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has
proved itself successful, because it is here. Geological time has carved
and sculpted our DNA to survive down to the present.
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

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. Telepathy and possession by the spirits of
the dead are not ruled out as a matter of principle. There is certainly
nothing impossible about abduction by aliens in UFOs. One day it may be
happen. But on grounds of probability it should be kept as an
explanation of last resort. It is unparsimonious, demanding more than
routinely weak evidence before we should believe it. If you hear hooves
clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or even a
unicorn, but, before we assume that it's anything other than a horse, we
should demand a certain minimal standard of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false
in the ordinary sense but true in some "alternative" sense. If a therapy
or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted
double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it
through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as
"orthodox" medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The
"alternative" label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity
from the same fate.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot
be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted from Carl E Bartecchi, "Be Wary of
Alternative Medicine" (Denver Business Journal: January 10, 2003) †â€

Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of
explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week
after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a
bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?
      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".
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science
is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (contributed by Ray Franz)

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection.
Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
-- Richard Dawkins, on describing how one need only look upon nature
where the wasp lays her eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar in
order to dispense with the idea that the Universe is supervised by a
benevolent deity, in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the
highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep
aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can
deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and
it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the
time we have for living is quite finite.
-- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the
Appetite for Wonder (1998), p. x., quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has
Science Found God? (2001)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, from "What is True?" in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

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....
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like
littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
used.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, from "Science, Genetics and Ethics," in The Devil's
Chaplain (2004)

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, from "Gaps in the Mind," in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious
sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say
something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured,
including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about
Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away
with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something
religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely
Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts
of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal
consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as
the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the
grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of
the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to
our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won
in opposition to the teeth of religion.
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely
Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, from The New Humanist, the Journal of the
Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107 No 2

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers
they claim, they'd 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. Either way, why are they
wasting their talents doing party turns on television?
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)

More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many
others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf,
restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural
presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of
universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific
difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific
claims.
      There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of
claiming that all religious beliefs are outside the domain of science.
On the one hand, miracle stories and the promise of life after death are
used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It
is precisely their scientific power that gives these stories their
popular appeal. But at the same time it is considered below the belt to
subject the same stories to the ordinary rigors of scientific criticism:
these are religious matters and therefore outside the domain of science.
But you cannot have it both ways. At least, religious theorists and
apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways.
Unfortunately all too many of us, including nonreligious people, are
unaccountably ready to let them.
-- Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, "When Religion Steps on Science's
Turf," Free Inquiry 18 no. 2 (1998): pp. 18-9, quoted from Victor J
Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with
extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and
our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time,
our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums,
gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic
credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
-- Richard Dawkins (attributed: source unknown)

To show how real astronomical wonder can be presented to children, I'll
borrow from a book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which I brought
back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large open space
and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball down and walk
ten paces in a straight line. Stick a pin in the ground. The head of the
pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another 9 paces beyond Mercury
and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Seven paces on, drop
another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from earth, another pinhead
represents the Moon, the furthest place, remember, that we've so far
reached. 14 more paces to little Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a
ping-pong ball. 112 paces further, Saturn is a marble. No time to deal
with the outer planets except to say that the distances are much larger.
But, how far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima
Centauri? Pick up another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a
walk of 4200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don't
even think about it!
      Who'd go back to astrology when they've sampled the real thing --
astronomy...?
-- Richard Dawkins, in "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder,"
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

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.
-- Richard Dawkins, in a letter to his daughter, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

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 Arabia.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible
people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here.
-- Richard Dawkins, excerpt from Chapter I, "The Anaesthetic of
Familiarity," of Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the
Appetite for Wonder (1998)

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally
opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, 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. To put it the other way round,
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 a part of it?
-- Richard Dawkins, excerpt from Chapter I, "The Anaesthetic of
Familiarity," of Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the
Appetite for Wonder (1998)

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