James D. Watson Quotes

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Many of us view the bible and other religious teachings as mythology.

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.

For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.

In earlier religions the spirit of the time was expressed through the individual and confirmed by miracles. In modern religions the spirit is expressed through the many and confirmed by reason.

The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I'm sure of that.

I think a lot of people really have religious overtones of having come from somewhere. I mean, even the whole concept of religion is kind of alien.

Religious thinkers have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.

As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense.

If you take a cold, blunt view of most religions, and you sort of say, 'Well, here's the basis for it,' most of them sound crazy. It's the belief that makes them real. I was interested in that question: When does a belief become a myth? When does something you believe in become just a story?

Magic is at the core of myths.

All religions have been made by men.

We live in secular world now, but most of our art and culture is rooted in religion.

The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old.

My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.

Primitive societies without religion have never been found.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

Mythology is a vast body of knowledge that has not been tapped.

I love religion and have contemplated going back to school to get a world religion degree.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.