Richard Dawkins Quotes
I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Bantam Books, 2006, p. 19.
When the priest died, 3 handwritten manuscripts were found written and signed by him in which he attacked religion in general and the church and the Bible in particular. His Testament was read by Voltaire and Denis Diderot among others and he was very influential in their development as opponents of organized religion. This quotation has been one of the bases of secular humanism which would then develop after he had died.
At the time, it was very difficult for people who had been taught all their lives that God was directly responsible for the creation to accept the notion of evolution. At the time, there was not the overwhelming evidence proving Darwin’s theory that we have today. Nor did theologians realize that evolution and Darwinism were not inconsistent with the concept of a creator and supreme being. Nonetheless, there are still those who, like Agassiz, reject evolution and insist that the Biblical version of creation is literally true. See {586990}. Then there are people who have come up with the concept of Intelligent Design which originated with Agassiz though he never called it that. Most religious people today, in contrast, see no conflict in natural selection as described by Darwin and later proven, and the concept of God. They see the Biblical creation as metaphorical and natural selection as the product of an omniscient supreme being.
Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.
