Atheist Quotes / Atheism Quotes - Richard Dawkins Quotes

Below are some choice quotes by Richard Dawkins (and a couple about Richard Dawkins).

This post may grow if and when I can manage to stomach tainting my mind by calling into remembrance the vast amounts of Richard Dawkins' bio-chemically educed brain secretions expressed as writing that I have read or if anyone places some good quotes into the comments section.

Richard Dawkins,

Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists.1

Richard Bube (Physicist, and former Chairman of the Department of Materials Science at Stanford),

There are proportionately as many atheistic truck drivers as there are atheistic scientists.2

About Richard Dawkins:
Alvin Plantinga, The Dawkins Confusion - Naturalism ad Absurdum:

Now despite the fact that this book [The God Delusion] is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.

Dinesh D'Souza interviewed by Vox Day,

This is Richard Dawkins and it clearly shows what happens when you let a biologist out of the lab. It shows a gross ignorance of history.

Dinesh D'Souza Interviewed by Marcia Segelstein,

…with a guy like Dawkins, you always have to pause because he knows so little about subjects outside of biology. In certain sectors of society, there's an awed reverence of Dawkins because he is a very learned and eloquent defender of Darwinian evolution. He has explained it beautifully and written about it very well. We often forget that the guy is a biologist, however, who actually doesn't know a whole lot about anything else.
His knowledge of history is poor; his knowledge of philosophy is abysmal; and his knowledge of theology is non-existent. When Dawkins wanders out of his field, he thus makes uninformed and often idiotic statements. So while in some ways I feel indignant about what he says, I also feel almost a sense of pity for him. The poor fellow is wandering around in intellectual fields where he is such an innocent.

H. Allen Orr (the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester),

…most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes.3

Richard Lewontin (Professor of biology; evolutionary biologist and geneticist) writes that Richard Dawkins appears in Carl Sagan's list of the "best contemporary science-popularizers" and is one who,

put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market.

Read the whole fascinating article and commentary: Billions and Billions of Demons and How Billions of Demons Haunted Baloney While Avoiding Detection

Anthony O'Hear (agnostic and philosopher) referring to Richard Dawkins,

…this particular Darwinian is quite unable to explain why we have an obligation to act against our "selfish" genes.4

Interview with Ben Stein from the movie Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed:

Ben Stein (BS) : "So you're a science guy. Can you quantify your assertion that there is no god? I mean, how sure are you?"
Richard Dawkins (RD) : "I really don't feel comfortable putting a number on it."
BS, "Ninety-nine percent?"
RD, "Yes, I guess 99 percent."
BS, "Why not 97?"
RD, "I suppose it could be 97. I'm not really-"
BS, "Well, if it could be 99 or 97."
RD, "You said that. I don't think it can be-"
BS, "-then why not 46 percent? 50 percent?"
RD, "I'm sure it's more than 50 percent improbable."
BS, "Well how do you know?"
RD, "I don't know, I said that, I -"

See "Expelled Exposed" Exposed

By Richard Dawkins:

Justin Brierley: Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.

Richard Dawkins: You could say that, yeah.5

…reports of child abuse cover a multitude of sins, from mild fondling to violent buggery…just because some pedophile assaults are violent and painful, it doesn't mean that all are. A child too young to notice what is happening at the hands of a gentle pedophile will have no difficulty at all in noticing the pain inflicted by a violent one. Phrases like "predatory monster" are not discriminating enough, and are framed in the light of adult hang-ups.6

See Torture, the Hell of Atheism and the "Gentle Pedophile"

Referring to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,

…you shriek like Hitler…You shriek and yell and rant like Hitler…you periodically rise to climaxes of shrieking rant, and that is just like Hitler.

See Hitler's Rabbi.

Referring to evolutionists whom he considers creationist appeasers,

the Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists.7

Referring to Pastor Ted Haggard's church service,

Well, you've certainly very effective at what you do I mean you seem to have all the airs of, well, it almost reminded me, you must forgive me, of Nuremburg Rally_Dr. Goebbels would have been proud.

Can anyone say Reductio ad Hitlerum?

…nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.8

Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.)…
if late-aborted embryos with nervous systems suffer - though all suffering is deplorable - it is not because they are human that they suffer. There is no general reason to suppose that human embryos at any stage suffer more than cow or sheep embryos at the same developmental stage.9

How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"10

Catholic child? Flinch. Protestant child? Squirm. Muslim child? Shudder. Everybody's consciousness should be raised to this level_I could well imagine that this linguistically coded freedom to choose might lead children to choose no religion at all.11

…we are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

And from his "Christmas Lectures for Young People" (1991):

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA…It is every living object's sole reason for living…that the purpose of all life is to pass on their DNA means that all living things are descended from a long line of successful ancestors…which can best be understood as fulfilling a purpose of propagating DNA…There is no purpose other than that.12

…how do I react to the idea of being a vehicle for DNA? It doesn't sound very romantic, does it? It doesn't sound the sort of vision of life that a poet would have; and I'm quite happy, quite ready to admit that when I'm not thinking about science I'm thinking in a very different way.13

What is a human? What is a human self, a human individual? That's more difficult. It's not a question I can answer - it's not a question any scientist can answer at present, though I think they will. I believe it will turn out that what a human is, is some manifestation of brain stuff and its workings…"I'm certainly happy that we are a product of brains and that when our brains die, we disappear.14

Awe and wonder are things which religious people undoubtedly feel, but I get a bit irritated when they imply they have a monopoly of them. I think I can feel wonder at least as well as the next man, and I am stimulated to do so by contemplating the huge size and age of the universe, the immense range of sizes of things, from fundamental particles to galaxies, and the awe-inspiring consequences of evolution, starting from simple beginnings and working up to prodigies of complexity like ourselves.15

This is Neo-Pagan-Atheism

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.16

I see absolutely no reason why, understanding the way the world is, you therefore have to promote it. The darwinian world is a very nasty place: the weakest go to the wall. There's no pity, no compassion. All those things I abhor, and I will work in my own life in the interests of thoroughly unDarwinian things like compassion.17

There is no logical connection between what is and what ought. Now, if you then ask me where I get my "ought" statements from, that's a more difficult question. Firstly, I don't feel so strongly about them. If I say something is wrong, like killing people, I don't find that nearly such a defensible statement as "I am a distant cousin of an orangutan". The second of those statements is true, I can tell you why it's true, I can bore you to death telling you why it's true. It's definitely true. The statement "killing people is wrong", to me, is not of that character. I would be quite open to persuasion that killing people is right in some circumstances.18

If somebody used my views to justify a completely self - centred lifestyle, which involved trampling all over other people in any way they chose roughly what, I suppose, at a sociological level social Darwinists did - I think I would be fairly hard put to it to argue on purely intellectual grounds. I think it would be more: "This is not a society in which I wish to live. Without having a rational reason for it necessarily, I'm going to do whatever I can to stop you doing this."
I couldn't, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, "Well, in this society you can't get away with it' and call the police."
I realise this is very weak, and I've said I don't feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it's a separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths.19

Larry Taunton interview, Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist,

"What is the objective of your anti-religious campaign?"
"'I think my ultimate goal would be to convert people away from particular religions toward a rationalist skepticism, tinged with _ no, that's too weak,' he said, correcting himself, '… glorying in the universe and in life. Yes, I would like people to be converted away from religion to skepticism.'" [ellipses in original]

This is Neo-Pagan-Atheism again.

I'm actually rather interested in the shifting zeitgeist. If you travel anywhere in the Western world, you find a consensus of opinion which is recognizably different from what it was only a matter of a decade or two ago. You and I are both a part of that same zeitgeist, and [as to where] we get our moral outlook, one can almost use phrases like "it's in the air."

What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.

"I [Larry Taunton] believe you can get your morality from the Bible." "Well, which bits of the Bible?" His [Richard Dawkins'] eyes flashed. "Presumably not Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy?" As I began to explain the function of Old Testament law, Dawkins pounced. "You're not telling me that as a civilized 21st-century man that you get your morality from the Ten Commandments?"

Can you say argument from outrage, argument for ridicule and argument from embarrassment?

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.20

I won't debate creationists.

Interview with Jonathan Miller who asked for Richard Dawkins' "most persuasive" argument for evolution through natural selection:

Um, there's got to be a series of advantages all the way in the feather. If you can't think of one then that's your problem, not natural selection's problem. Natural selection, um, well, I suppose that is a sort of matter of faith on my, on my part since the theory is so coherent and so powerful…

Jonathan Miller: "So when, at the age of 16, you became acquainted with Darwin, was it because you were taught about Darwin, or you began reading The Origin of Species?"

Richard Dawkins "No, it was because I was taught."21

Chance, luck, coincidence, miracle…events that we commonly call miracles are not supernatural, but are part of a spectrum of more-or-less improbable natural events. A miracle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck.22

It is as though, in our theory of how we came to exist, we are allowed to postulate a certain ration of luck.23

Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler's parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo? An even closer analogy is the human urge to adopt a child…
I must rush to add that "misfiring" is intended only in a strictly Darwinian sense. It carries no suggestion of the pejorative. The "mistake" or "by-product" idea, which I am espousing, works like this. Natural selection…programmed into our brains altruistic urges, alongside sexual urges, hunger urges, xenophobic urges and so on.24

1. 1. Wired Magazine online: Gary Wolf, The Church of the Non-Believers (found here
2. 2. Byron Barlowe (Leadership University Editor/Webmaster), Science & Religion: Oil & Water?
3. 3. H. Allen Orr; Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester, "A Mission to Convert," New York Times, Vol. 54, No. 1, Jan. 11, 2007. A review of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.
4. 4. Anthony O'Hear, Beyond Evolution - Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 103
5. 5. Stated during an interview with Justin Brierley
6. 6. Richard Dawkins, Religion's Real Child Abuse
7. 7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), p. beginning at 66
8. 8. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden - A Darwinian View of Life (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995), p. 96
9. 9. Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 293, 297
10. 10. Gary Wolf, "The Church of the Non-Believers," Wired Magazine online (found here)
11. 11. Richard Dawkins, Now Here's a Bright Idea
12. 12. Nick Pollard talks to Dr. Richard Dawkins (interviewed February 28th, 1995 published in Third Way in the April 1995 edition [vol 18 no. 3])
13. 13. Sheena McDonald's, Interview with Richard Dawkins (1994 U.K. Channel 4)
14. 14. Pollard
15. 15. Pollard
16. 16. Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain - Selected Essays (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p. 10-11
17. 17. Pollard
18. 18. Pollard
19. 19. Pollard
20. 20. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), p. 1
21. 21. The Atheism Tapes, Part 4: Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller
22. 22. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 139
23. 23. Ibid, p. 145
24. 24. Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 220-221