By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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.
Natural selection is anything but random.
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
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.
I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.
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?
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
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?
Segregation has no place in the education system.
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.
We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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.
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
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.
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.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
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.
Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.
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.
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.
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.
Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.
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.
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.
