“If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.”

— Richard Dawkins

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

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Richard Dawkins 322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“science is the best way to do anything (if you want to do terrible things with technology, a terrible weapons for example science is the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything)”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

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“Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

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“You live in an age that is dominated by science and engineering. …Thus if you wish to be effective in the world and to achieve the things that you want, it is necessary to understand both science and engineering”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

and those require mathematics
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

“Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?”

John Marks Templeton (1912–2008) stock investor, businessman and philanthropist

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Context: We hope that there will be nothing that conflicts with anybody's religion or faith. We would never say a person's religion is not effective. We say, "Would you be interested in something more effective?" We always put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective. Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?

“I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble”

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or the gambol
[199709292259.PAA10407@wall.org, 1997]
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“Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way.”

Alvin Plantinga (1932) American Christian philosopher

[2011-12-13, Interview with Alvin Plantinga on Where the Conflict Really Lies, Paul, Pardi, Philosophy News, http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/12/13/Interview-with-Alvin-Plantinga-on-Where-the-Conflict-Really-Lies.aspx]
Posed question: Are you mainly trying to show that there's no logical conflict even though there might be a methodological conflict?

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Variant: well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
Source: My Sister's Keeper

“If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.”

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“There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

We The Living (1936)
Source: We The Living Part One Chapter 6

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Richard Dawkins 322

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