Clinton Richard Dawkins známy ako Richard Dawkins, je významný britský zoológ, etológ, evolučný biológ a propagátor ateizmu.
„Som proti náboženstvu, lebo nás učí uspokojiť sa s tým, že nerozumieme svetu.“
'en: I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Prisudzované výroky
DVD: „From frog to a prince“ 4:28
'en: And, of course, the puzzling thing is where does all this complexity come from? Where does all this information come from? It cannot come about by chance. It’s absolutely inconceivable that you could get something as complicated as a bird, and as well designed as a bird, or a human, or a hedgehog, coming about by chance. That’s absolutely out. Because to get from nothing, from no complexity, no information, to the extreme complexity of a modern living thing in one step of chance couldn’t possibly happen. That would be like throwing a dice a thousand times and getting six every single time. It’s out of the question. But if you allow a little bit of luck in any one generation, and then a little bit of luck in the next generation, little bit of luck in the next generation, by cumulatively adding this luck step by step by step by step, you can work from any degree of simplicity to any degree of complexity. All you need is enough time. So where’s it come from? It’s come from gradual incremental process of evolution by natural selection.
Potvrdené výroky
'en: Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
Potvrdené výroky
'en: Religions do make claims about the universe – the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.
Prisudzované výroky
'en: (Edge Foundation): What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? (Dawkins): I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
Potvrdené výroky
'en: Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
Prisudzované výroky
z River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, 1995
'en: 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.
Potvrdené výroky
The God Delusion, s. 59
'en: The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet - a decided one.
Potvrdené výroky
„Viera je presvedčenie napriek tomu, alebo práve preto, že chýbajú dôkazy.“
'en: Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Podobné: Viera znamená presvedčenie, že isté tvrdenia sú pravdivé - napriek tomu, že dôkazy ich pravdivosti sú nedostatočné alebo vyvracajúce jeho pravdivosť. (Dan Barker)
Prisudzované výroky
Dawkins has stated on many occasions that this passage will be read at his funeral.
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
Kontext: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
Zdroj: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
Kontext: Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.
Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
The Huffington Post, 23/10/2006 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-dawkins/why-there-almost-certainl_b_32164.html
Why There Almost Certainly Is No God (2006)
“The universe does not owe you a sense of hope.”
The Big Questions (2008)
Kontext: "The universe does not owe you a sense of hope. It could be that the world, the universe, is a totally hopeless place. I don't as a matter of fact think it is, but even if it were - that would not be a good reason for believing in God. You cannot say "I believe in X", whatever X is - God or anything else - "because that gives me hope". You have to say "I believe in X because there is some evidence for X". In the case of God - there is not a tiny shred of evidence for the existence of any kind of god.” … “There's plenty of reason for hope in a Godless world. The universe is a beautiful place. The world is a beautiful place. To understand it in a clear-eyed, open-eyed way; to look out at the world and to really understand why we exist, what it's all about - that is a hugely uplifting feeling; That really does give a sense of worth to life, even if life itself is finite, as I believe it is. Nevertheless, it is not a hopeless life without a god, and to re-divert to my earlier point, even if it were - then it's just illogical to say that that gives you evidence for the belief in God." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of-8Q3HySjE&t=44m08s
The God Delusion (2006)
Kontext: If the alternative that's being offered to what physicists now talk about - a big bang, a spontaneous singularity which gave rise to the origin of the universe - if the alternative to that is a divine intelligence, a creator, which would have to have been complicated, statistically improbable, the very kind of thing which scientific theories such as Darwin's exists to explain, then immediately we see that however difficult and apparently inadequate the theory of the physicists is, the theory of the theologians - that the first course was a complicated intelligence - is even more difficult to accept. They're both difficult but the theory of the cosmic intelligence is even worse. What Darwinism does is to raise our consciousness to the power of science to explain the existence of complex things and intelligences, and creative intelligences are above all complex things, they're statistically improbable. Darwinism raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how such entities - and the human brain is one - can come into existence from simple beginnings. However difficult those simple beginnings may be to accept, they are a whole lot easier to accept than complicated beginnings. Complicated things come into the universe late, as a consequence of slow, gradual, incremental steps. God, if he exists, would have to be a very, very, very complicated thing indeed. So to postulate a God as the beginning of the universe, as the answer to the riddle of the first cause, is to shoot yourself in the conceptual foot because you are immediately postulating something far far more complicated than that which you are trying to explain. Now, physicists cope with this problem in various ways, which may seem somewhat unconvincing. For example, they suggest that our universe is but one bubble in foam of universes, the multiverse, and each bubble in the foam has a different set of laws and constants. And by the anthropic principle we have to be - since we're here talking about it - in the kind of bubble, with the kind of laws and constants, which are capable of giving rise to the evolutionary process and therefore to creatures like us. That is one current physicists' explanation for how we exist in the kind of universe that we do. It doesn't sound so shatteringly convincing as say Darwin's own theory, which is self-evidently very convincing. Nevertheless, however unconvincing that may sound, it is many, many, many orders of magnitude more convincing than any theory that says complex intelligence was there right from the outset. If you have problems seeing how matter could just come into existence - try thinking about how complex intelligent matter, or complex intelligent entities of any kind, could suddenly spring into existence, it's many many orders of magnitude harder to understand.
Lynchburg, Virginia, 23/10/2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M&t=42m41s
When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks
Has the world changed? http://books.guardian.co.uk/writersreflections/story/0,1367,567546,00.html, The Guardian (October 11, 2001)
Zdroj: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Zdroj: Reviewing Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution (1989) by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson
Zdroj: Last sentence expanded upon in "Ignorance is No Crime" (2001) (see below)
Kontext: So to the book's provocation, the statement that nearly half the people in the United States don't believe in evolution. Not just any people but powerful people, people who should know better, people with too much influence over educational policy. We are not talking about Darwin's particular theory of natural selection. It is still (just) possible for a biologist to doubt its importance, and a few claim to. No, we are here talking about the fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. 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).
If that gives you offence, I'm sorry. You are probably not stupid, insane or wicked; and ignorance is no crime in a country with strong local traditions of interference in the freedom of biology educators to teach the central theorem of their subject.
Zdroj: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Zdroj: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
“By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service" [1.02], 20 August 2007, timecode 00:13:05"ff"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Varianta: We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out.
Zdroj: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
“Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.”
The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002)
Kontext: We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
Zdroj: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
Zdroj: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
“Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
Zdroj: The Selfish Gene
“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
Zdroj: River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Zdroj: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Zdroj: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
