Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s “Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.” Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he’s a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin’s ideas. In this talk, titled, “Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science,” he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved only to understand the “middle-sized” world we can observe. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:42)
From “Unweaving the Rainbow” Richard Dawkins
“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 didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.”
Part 1 (9:31)
Part 2 (4:38)
Richard’s response when asked about how the world changed with the attack in the USA on Sept. 11: “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!” – from The Guardian
From RichardDawkins.net:
When you stand on the top of a mountain doesn’t the vastness of the world strike you? Don’t you feel charmed by the beauty of the nature, and the mysterious laws of the vast Universe?
Of course I do. And I have mentioned about it in the first chapter of my book as the spirituality followed by Einstein. He was so charmed about the mysteries of the world and it was such an exciting experience to explore it. It’s a kind of spirituality that does not require God, a personal deity to explain the mysteries of Nature. It is quite different from a religion centered around a God who can read mind, keeps track of sins, judges people after death punishes the disbelievers and rules the Universe.
November 26th, 2007 - 15:46
This sounds like a description of Marxism: “Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism.” Of course, Marxism is considered revealed faith to many. That is why secular communist governments killed more people in the 20th century than did all religious conflicts.