Richard Dawkins Quotes

The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we do - what we're really good at, which is - which is theology and morality.

I think science and religion should be separate.

Two of the many areas of conflict between Judeo-Christian values and leftism concern the separation between the holy and the profane and the separation between humans and animals.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

Politics are not the task of a Christian.

Science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria.

In my own life, my science and my religion are separate.

There is always a pressure to separate the Bible from science and to separate the Christian religion from things material.

John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. George Washington warned us never to indulge the supposition 'that morality can be maintained without religion.'

If evolution wins, Christianity goes!

I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.

You ask people, do you pray to [a person or] God. If you say yes to that, you're religious by, presumably, anybody's standards of your conduct. And it's the yes to that question that applies to 40% of scientists. So, there're plenty of atheists who are scientists or not scientists. There maybe a conflict but many people in this country coexist in both worlds.

This is one thing that's very interesting, how the people on the left always talk about separation of church and state. When you look at the theocracies all across the Middle East, where we look at constitutions that are based upon the Qur'an, I don't think you want to see that happening in the United States of America. So it is a theocratic political construct.

I think those governments who resent religion, they're afraid of religion because religion may be in their eyes, in their views be seen as a counter government or a parallel government.

Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

I'm willin' for any solution - religious, political. I'm not going to keep offerin' to negotiate so much because they turn us down each time. It indicates a weakness on our part.

I think it's very important for people who are serving (in office) to make sure there's a separation of church and state.

As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

I don't think there is any incompatibility between science and mysticism . . . Immanent religion is the only form of religion in which there is no conflict at all, that I can see, between science and religion.

I don't think Israel's becoming more religious, I think its politics is becoming more religious. There's a difference.

Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don’t believe in organized religion at all. It’s what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious