192 quotes
[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.
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.
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)
There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
This belief, that Darwinian evolution is "random", is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially non-random.
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
It is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.
The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.
The Enemies of Reason (2007)
I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)
The Root of All Evil? (2006)
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. (p. 40)
The God Delusion (2006)
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.
The Root of All Evil? (2006)
I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?
So whereabouts in my body might there be a black hole?
The Enemies of Reason (2007)
The truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry.
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle—power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold.
River out of Eden (1995)