110+ Richard Dawkins Quotes On Creation, Intelligent Design And Jesus

Richard Dawkins is an English evolutionary biologist, ethologist, and author. He is well known for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. He is also known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Richard Dawkins on life, creation, intelligent design.

Top 10 Richard Dawkins Quotes

1. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
2. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
3. Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.
4. How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
5. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
6. The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
7. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
8. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
9. Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
10. I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

Richard Dawkins Short Quotes

• Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
• If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.
• I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.
• Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
• The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.
• I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.
• Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
• DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
• By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!
• I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Life

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God? — Richard Dawkins

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living. — Richard Dawkins

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. — Richard Dawkins

Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop — Richard Dawkins

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. — Richard Dawkins

What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child. — Richard Dawkins

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. — Richard Dawkins

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that. — Richard Dawkins

When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that. — Richard Dawkins

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. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Creation

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). — Richard Dawkins

Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature. — Richard Dawkins

The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. — Richard Dawkins

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence. — Richard Dawkins

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. — Richard Dawkins

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant. — Richard Dawkins

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. — Richard Dawkins

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution. — Richard Dawkins

If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation? — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Intelligent Design

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. — Richard Dawkins

When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. — Richard Dawkins

Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Jesus

It could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small - at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case. — Richard Dawkins

Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes. — Richard Dawkins

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk. — Richard Dawkins

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Evolution

Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. — Richard Dawkins

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. — Richard Dawkins

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. — Richard Dawkins

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. — Richard Dawkins

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. — Richard Dawkins

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity. — Richard Dawkins

The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being. — Richard Dawkins

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes. — Richard Dawkins

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. — Richard Dawkins

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Science

Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin. — Richard Dawkins

Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science. — Richard Dawkins

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

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off. Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb) — Richard Dawkins

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error. — Richard Dawkins

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. — Richard Dawkins

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. — Richard Dawkins

I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things. — Richard Dawkins

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it. — Richard Dawkins

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About World

If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. — Richard Dawkins

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. — Richard Dawkins

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it? — Richard Dawkins

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. — Richard Dawkins

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all — Richard Dawkins

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer. — Richard Dawkins

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. — Richard Dawkins

Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. — Richard Dawkins

I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world. — Richard Dawkins

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Religion

It's a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe - capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process - that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn't think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death. — Richard Dawkins

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed. — Richard Dawkins

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. — Richard Dawkins

The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous. — Richard Dawkins

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

‎"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling. — Richard Dawkins

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

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. — Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Universe

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe. — Richard Dawkins

The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible - not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. — Richard Dawkins

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic. — Richard Dawkins

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans. — Richard Dawkins

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe. — Richard Dawkins

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. — Richard Dawkins

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. — Richard Dawkins

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. — Richard Dawkins

bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen. — Richard Dawkins

What is the purpose of the universe?" is a silly question. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself. — Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do. — Richard Dawkins

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so. — Richard Dawkins

Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought. — Richard Dawkins

If you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but they believe different things---they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do. — Richard Dawkins

Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism. — Richard Dawkins

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up. — Richard Dawkins

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. — Richard Dawkins

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. — Richard Dawkins

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable. — Richard Dawkins

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund. — Richard Dawkins

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation. — Richard Dawkins

I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian. — Richard Dawkins

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'. — Richard Dawkins

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? — Richard Dawkins

Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded. — Richard Dawkins

Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'. — Richard Dawkins

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place. — Richard Dawkins

You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian? — Richard Dawkins

The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful. — Richard Dawkins

Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too. — Richard Dawkins

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans. — Richard Dawkins

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all? — Richard Dawkins

With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig. — Richard Dawkins

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. — Richard Dawkins

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. — Richard Dawkins

If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests. — Richard Dawkins

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret. — Richard Dawkins

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy. — Richard Dawkins

If you are religious at all, it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false (knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan), you are the victim of childhood indoctrination. — Richard Dawkins

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. — Richard Dawkins

My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned. — Richard Dawkins

You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence. — Richard Dawkins

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process. — Richard Dawkins

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe — Richard Dawkins

Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals. — Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. — Richard Dawkins

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong. — Richard Dawkins

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. — Richard Dawkins

If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper university. — Richard Dawkins

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version. — Richard Dawkins

[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests. — Richard Dawkins

We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution — Richard Dawkins

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. — Richard Dawkins

...I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented. — Richard Dawkins

It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid. — Richard Dawkins

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. — Richard Dawkins

Life Lessons by Richard Dawkins

1. Richard Dawkins taught us to never be afraid to challenge the status quo and to think for ourselves. He encouraged us to question accepted beliefs and to use our own judgement to form our own opinions.
2. He also showed us the importance of being open minded and to never be afraid to accept new ideas and theories.
3. Finally, he taught us to be passionate about our beliefs and to never be afraid to stand up for what we believe in.