Richard Dawkins Quotes

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

Does God exist? Well, I would say, 'not yet'.

The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?

God affords no man the comfort, the false comfort of Atheism: He will not allow a pretending Atheist the power to flatter himself, so far, as to seriously think there is no God.

If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.

I have hitherto followed the lines marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a mind behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this mind. I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?

I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.

Hindus believe in God positively. Buddhism does not try to know whether He is or not.

There must be a God because he made me.

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.

Now it seems that everything in the world stems from sources other than God, since the products of nature have their source in nature; deliberate effects can be traced back to human reason or will as their source. There is no need then to assume that God exists.

For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.

I am persuaded that men think there is no God because they wish there were none. They find it hard to believe in God, and to go on in sin, so they try to get an easy conscience by denying his existence.

Atheists who keep asking for evidence of God's existence are like a fish in the ocean wanting evidence of water.

If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue.

Arguing whether or not a God exists is like fleas arguing whether or not the dog exists. Arguing over the correct name for God is like fleas arguing over the name of the dog. And arguing over whose notion of God is correct is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog.

But never in the four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror.

If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition of theism.

There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric god. I cannot prove that either the Christian god or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.

What do I believe? I believe in God, if he exists.