#richard dawkins

“You cannot have it both ways. If you claim the right to pick and choose the nice bits of the Bible and sweep the nasty bits under the carpet, you have sold the pass. You have admitted that you do not, as a matter of fact, get your values from an ancient and authoritative holy book.You are demonstrably getting your values from some modern source, some contemporary liberal consensus or whatever it is. Otherwise by what criterion do you choose the good bits of the Bible while rejecting, say, Deuteronomy’s clear injunction to stone non-virgin brides to death?

Wherever this contemporary liberal consensus may come from, I am entitled to appeal to it when I explicitly reject the authority of my ancient text - the DNA - just as you are entitled to appeal to it when you implicitly reject your - rather less ancient - texts from human scriptures. We can all sit down together and work out the values we want to follow. Whether we are talking about four-thousand-year-old parchment scrolls, or four-thousand-million-year-old DNA, we are all entitled to throw off the tyranny of the texts.”

- Richard Dawkins, ‘Science in the Soul’

“Engineers and architects are never asked to build unbreakable structures, impregnable walls. Instead, they are given a monetary budget and asked to do the best they can, according to certain criteria, within that constraint. Or they may be told: the bridge must bear a weight of ten tons, and must withstand gales three times more forceful than the worst ever recorded in this gorge. Now design the most economical bridge you can that meets these specifications. Safety factors in engineering imply monetary valuation of human life. Designers of civilian airliners are more risk-averse than designers of military aircraft. All aircraft and ground control facilities could be safer if more money was spent. More redundancy could be built into control systems, the number of flying hours demanded of a pilot before he is allowed to carry live passengers could be increased. Baggage inspection could be more stringent and time-consuming.

The reason we don’t take these steps to make life safer is largely one of cost. We are prepared to pay a lot of money, time and trouble for human safety, but not infinite amounts. Like it or not, we are forced to put monetary value on human life. In most people’s scale of values, human life rates higher than non-human animal life, but animal life does not have zero value. Notoriously, the evidence of newspaper coverage suggests that people value life belonging to their own race higher than human life generally. In wartime, both absolute and relative valuations of human life change dramatically. People who think it is somehow wicked to talk about this monetary valuation of human life - people who emotionally declare that a single human life has infinite value - are living in cloud-cuckoo-land.”

- Richard Dawkins, ‘Science in the Soul’

The White Atheist divine trinity

The fact that it has nothing elseto contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn - for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept} Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion? 

The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply ‘God’. I am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.  (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)

I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, conies into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.

 Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

American polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews, however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.  (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)