Richard Dawkins: Quotes about God

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)
Source: Part 1: "The God Delusion"

God

“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.”

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins debates Rowan Williams (2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVxciEFyBT0&t=32m42s

Sleep , Thinking , God

“[God is] a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic racist, an infanticidal, genocidal, phillicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006)
Context: 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. (p. 31 of the hardcover edition and p. 51 of the paperback edition; see also: Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, foreword by Richard Dawkins, 2016)

God

“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 book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

God , Understanding , Knowledge

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 360

Life , God , Children , Parent

“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.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The God Delusion (2006)
Context: 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

Universe , God

“A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

God , People , Intelligence

“Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”

Richard Dawkins

God

“Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

God , Help

“You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God?”

Richard Dawkins

Part 2, 00:13:55
Part 2: "The Virus of Faith", quoted at "The Proper Study of Mankind" blog http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/01/root-of-all-evil-part-2-virus-of-faith.html on January 25, 2006
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

God , Parting

“I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The God Delusion (2006)

God

“On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know."”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 184

God

“A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 178

God , Universe

“I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)”

Richard Dawkins

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

God , Parting

“I can't be sure God does not exist… On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six… That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.”

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins on The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Dawkins-I-cant-be-sure-God-does-not-exist.html, .

God , Confidence

“On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion."”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 102

God , People , Perfection

“It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. 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

From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, . Frequently misattributed to The God Delusion.
quoted in [EDITORIAL: A scientist's case against God, The Independent (London), April 20, 1992, 17] and [2011-05-27, What Should I Believe?: Philosophical Essays for Critical Thinking, Paul Gomberg, Broadview Press, 9781554810130, 146, http://books.google.com/books?id=76WxxHN9I0kC&pg=PA146&dq=%22Faith+is+the+great+cop-out%22]

God , Sense , Christmas

“In the case of the cosmos, […] even if we don’t understand how it came about, it’s not helpful to postulate a creator, because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it’s difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of - how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.”

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox, 21/10/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UIbd0eLxw&t=10m38s
"Has Science Buried God?" Debate (2008)

God , Hell , Understanding , Thinking

“To an atheist […], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life". But how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.”

Richard Dawkins

End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMUG6qd98wc
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Love , Life , God , People

“Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.”

Richard Dawkins

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

God , Intelligence , Universe