Richard Dawkins Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

  Richard Dawkins

  Nature, Learning, Science

  Richard Dawkins (1995). “River out of eden: a Darwinian view of life”, Basic Books (AZ)

• The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all species are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

  Richard Dawkins

  Running, Animal, Years

  "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1995.

• Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

  Richard Dawkins

  Father, Reality, Suffering

  "Science saves". www.theguardian.com. December 30, 2004.

• Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

  Richard Dawkins

  Suffering, Atheism, Kind

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.

  Richard Dawkins

  Baby, Children, Pregnancy

• 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

  Worry, Suffering, Nihilism

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.392, Simon and Schuster

• For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment."

  Richard Dawkins

  Cells, Issues, Suffering

  Source: inters.org

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