Citaten: Richard Dawkins on atheism and religion

[Hein van Meeteren]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Nee, Bart, zo makkelijk gaat het niet. Even een kwakje op de lijst en
dan copy-paste citaten. Over ego's oppoetsen gepsproken. Laat eens
horen, Bart, wat denk ->jíj nu van religie? Ben je ook zo'n fanate
religie-hater? Dus even niet verschuilen achter citaten van een zoöloog,
maar jijzelf.
Ik zal je bijdrage met plzier lezen en er op reageren indien opportuun.
Vriendelijke groeten, Hein

Bart Meerdink schreef:
> 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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