If you’re looking for The God Delusion quotes about science, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people and sources. And in this article we share a list of the 10 most interesting The God Delusion quotes about science from Richard Dawkins. Let’s get inspired!
The God Delusion quotes about science
It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn’t even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!’ Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced—too eagerly in my view—that the question of God’s existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God’s existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
… the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world (…) where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn’t need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by ‘truth’. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
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