Richard Dawkins Atheism Quotations

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.

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.

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes and that's because I am passionate about the truth. ... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.

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.

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

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.

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.

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.

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

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.

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.

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.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.

Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.

…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.