Richard Dawkins Quotes About Universe

Quotes about: Universe

• 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

  Beautiful, Doe, World

  "The Vision Thing". Interview with Sheena McDonald for Channel 4 (UK), www.thirdworldtraveler.com. August 15, 1994.

• After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

  Richard Dawkins

  Life, Gratitude, Morning

• On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.

  Richard Dawkins

  Running, Falling In Love, Swimming

• 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.

  Richard Dawkins

  Funny, Sarcastic, Atheist

  River Out of Eden ch. 4 (1995)

• The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

  Richard Dawkins

  Years, Justice, Mad

  Richard Dawkins, Yan Wong (2005). “The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution”, p.613, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

  Beautiful, Atheist, Believe

  Richard Dawkins (2000). “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

  Thinking, Law, Ideas

  Interview with Chip Rowe, www.playboy.com. August 20, 2012.

• 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

  Thinking, Law, Who Cares

  Source: inters.org

• The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Reality, Ideas, Divine

• Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Mysterious, Universe

  "Religion and Atheism". "Q&A" with Tony Jones, www.abc.net.au. April 9, 2012.

• There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that's fine. I mean, that's just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Fundamentals, Mysterious

  "Faith and Reason" Interview, www.pbs.org.

• Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

  Richard Dawkins

  Dog, Atheist, Thinking

• A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheism, Looks, Different

• 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

  Hurt, Order, Personality

  Richard Dawkins (2012). “The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True”, p.226, Simon and Schuster

• 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.

• Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Ideas, Giving

• If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... 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

  Selfish, Evil, Design

• Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ideas, Giving, Desire

  Source: inters.org

• We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Animal, Complicated, Known

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

• To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.

  Richard Dawkins

  Water, Religion, Puddles

• 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

  Mind, Would Be, Firsts

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion.

  Richard Dawkins

  Suicide, Mean, Origin Of Life

• The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

  Richard Dawkins

  Nice, Condolences, Feelings

• I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

  Richard Dawkins

  Fall, Mean, Thinking

  "Richard Dawkins on the Truth of Evolution". "NOW with Bill Moyers", billmoyers.com. 2004.

• It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.

  Richard Dawkins

  Numbers, Order, Understanding

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