Ричард Докинз цитаты

страница 9

„Когда люди верят в нечто, потому что боятся попасть в ад, — это просто чушь невменяемая. Но если родители вбивают ребёнку страх перед Богом, религия распространяется как вирус.“

„После сна длиной в сотни миллионов веков, мы, наконец, открыли глаза на шикарной планете, сверкающей цветами, богатой жизнью. В течение нескольких десятилетий мы должны будем закрыть глаза снова. Это ли не благородный, просвещённый путь посвятить наше короткое время под солнцем работе над пониманием вселенной и того, как мы в ней оказались? Вот как я отвечаю, когда меня спрашивают, зачем я утруждаюсь вставать по утрам с постели.“

„Мы умрем, и это делает нас счастливчиками. Большинство людей никогда не умрут, потому что они никогда не родятся. Число потенциальных людей, которые могли бы быть здесь, на моем месте, но на самом деле никогда не увидят дневного света, намного больше, чем песчинок в Сахаре. Разумеется, что в рядах неродившихся призраков находятся поэты более великие, чем Китc, ученые более великие, чем Ньютон. Мы знаем это, потому что множество людей, допустимое нашими ДНК, несравнимо больше, чем множество настоящих людей. И из пасти этих мизерных шансов рождения вырвались заурядные вы и я. Мы привилегированная кучка людей, которые вопреки всем шансам выиграли в лотерею рождения. Как мы смеем жаловаться на наше неминуемое возвращение в то состояние, из которого подавляющие большинство никогда не рождалось.“

„Религиозные люди любят обращать внимание на то, что Исаак Ньютон был верующим. Ну конечно был – он же жил до Дарвина. До Дарвина быть атеистом было, наверно, не так-то просто.“

„Вы писали, что если Иисус существовал и пошел на смерть, как это описано в Библии, то у него, как вы выразились, съехала крыша.
— Нет никаких свидетельств, что у самого Иисуса съехала крыша, но вот доктрина, изобретенная впоследствии Павлом, – что Иисус умер за наши грехи – она совершенно безумна. Это же отвратительно: полагать, что творец вселенной, способный изобрести законы физики и процессы эволюции не нашел лучшего способа искупить наши грехи, нежели дать замучить себя до смерти!“

„У вас есть верующие друзья?
— Нет. Не то чтобы я избегал таких людей – просто я вращаюсь в образованных, интеллектуальных кругах, а там религиозных людей обычно не встретишь. Я в хороших отношениях с некоторыми епископами и священниками, которые типа во что-то верят… или им просто нравятся музыка и витражи.“

„Так что же делает нас людьми?
— Мы уникальные обезьяны. У нас есть язык. У других животных тоже есть коммуникативные системы, но куда более несовершенные. У них нет нашей способности говорить о вещах, которых нет в реальности. Это уникальные черты нашего развитого обезьяньего мозга, который, судя по имеющимся доказательствам, прошел лишь через небольшое количество мутаций.“

„Быть может, осознание возникает тогда, когда модель мира, создаваемая мозгом, достигает такой полноты, что ему приходится включать в нее модель самого себя.“

„Какова судьба древних репликаторов теперь, спустя 4x10^9 лет? Они не вымерли, ибо они — непревзойденные мастера в искусстве выживания. Но не надо искать их в океане, они давно перестали свободно и непринужденно парить в его водах. Теперь они собраны в огромные колонии и находятся в полной безопасности в гигантских неуклюжих роботах, отгороженные от внешнего мира, общаясь с ним извилистыми непрямыми путями и воздействуя на него с помощью дистанционного управления. Они присутствуют в вас и во мне; они создали нас, наши души и тела; и единственный смысл нашего существования — их сохранение. Они прошли длинный путь, эти репликаторы. Теперь они существуют под названием генов, а мы служим для них машинами выживания.“

„Между прочим, религиозный студент может придти в замешательство, недоумевая зачем Бог создаёт проблемы, снабжая хищников красивой адаптацией для ловли добычи, при этом другой рукой снабжая добычу красивой адаптацией, препятствующей этому. Видимо Он наслаждается этим спортом как зритель.“

„Вас не волнует, что ваши оппоненты могут попытаться обратить вас к вере на смертном одре, как креационисты попытались поступить с Дарвином?
— Меня больше волнует эффект Энтони Флю. Флю был британским философом-атеистом, который на старости лет обратился. Думаю, он просто впал в маразм. И от этого-то никакой гарантии нет!“

„Если бы сторонники расовой сегрегации были поумнее, они бы, заявили — насколько мне известно, не кривя при этом душой, — что смешение рас противоречит их религии. Большая часть оппозиции тут же почтительно удалилась бы на цыпочках. И не нужно заявлять, что это несправедливое сравнение, потому что и у расовой сегрегации нет рационального обоснования. Аналогично этому главным постулатом религиозной веры, силой её и вящей славой служит то, что от неё не требуется рационального обоснования. Остальным нам приходится отстаивать свои убеждения. Но попроси верующего обосновать его веру — и тебя обвинят в посягательстве на «свободу совести.»“

“Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.”

“I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.”

“(Spectrum level 6) I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”

“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”

“Amusingly, it [astrology] falls foul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping. How would we react if a newspaper published a daily column that read something like this: "Germans: It is in your nature to be hard-working and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you will need to curb your natural tendency to obey orders. Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages, but it may be your undoing today. British: Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life.”

“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.”

“… the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria … All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.”

“But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”

“But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.”

“The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.”

“On natural selection: "Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance."”

“I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.”

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

“SJWs can't forgive Shakespeare for having the temerity to be white and male.”

“Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.”

“As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.”

“No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!”

“Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, ' If science can't do something, therefore religion can.”

“And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.”

“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones.”

“I don't withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other. I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here, but it is the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself. ”

“Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.”

“I think there really is a place for science in literature and I think that may be increasing”

“However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747”

“I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.”

“Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old king's genes.”

“Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than "barking mad."”

“I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."”

“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.”