
Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science

There are, on the other hand, good reasons to go back to scripture as literature, because, as I also said in The God Delusion, our whole culture is so bound up with it that you can’t take your allusions or understand your history if you are biblically illiterate. Indeed, I filled two pages with close-packed biblical quotations, phrases familiar to
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God is Not Great complements rather than competes with The God Delusion. Where I, as a scientist, am most concerned with religious faith as a rival to science in the role of explainer, Christopher’s objections were more political and moral. He found repugnant the very idea of a celestial dictator who demands total obedience and devotion, and is pre
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The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Richard Dawkins • Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
Steven Weinberg’s much-quoted dictum: ‘With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.’
Richard Dawkins • Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
‘Concentrating only on the usefulness of science is a bit like celebrating music because it is good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.’
Richard Dawkins • Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
It is by the standards of a civilized twenty-first-century conversation that we cherry-pick the Bible and decide that this verse is bad but that one good. And since we evidently have preferred and agreed standards for cherry-picking, why bother to go to the Bible at all, if we seek moral guidance? Why not go straight to our moral Zeitgeist and cut
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It is truly astonishing that his main objection to my lecturing on evolution was that I held ‘views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’. What does Rep. Thomsen think a university is for?
Richard Dawkins • Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s ju
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- Douglas Adams
Another of my ten difficult choices concerned the perceived need to provide ‘balance’, something that especially afflicts the BBC because of its charter. I quoted a favourite maxim, which I think I first heard from Alan Grafen: ‘When two opposing points of view are advocated with equal vigour, the truth doesn’t necessarily lie halfway between. It’s
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