I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.
— Richard Dawkins
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
I love romantic poetry.
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.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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?
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
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.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.
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.
I love words.
My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.
Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
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.
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
