The God Delusion - Dawkins Flashcards
It is astonishing how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’.
The consolation content of a belief does not raise its truth-value.
The comfort that religion offers is founded on the neurologically highly implausible premise that we survive the death of our brains.
Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection.
‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’
An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand.
If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
‘If any of you clowns are right about anything, the cartoonists are going to hell anyway - won’t that do? In the meantime, if you want to get excited about affronts to Muslims, read the Amnesty International reports on Syria and Saudia Arabia’.
What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?
It’s not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. It’s an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism.
The other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the overweening confidence with which the religious assert minute details for which they neither have, nor could have, any evidence.
Perhaps it is the very fact that there is no evidence to support theological opinions, either way, that fosters the characteristic draconian hostility towards those of slightly different opinion.
‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.’ David Hume’s pithy test for a miracle.
Ever since the 19th century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world.
People of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they’d like to be true.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance.
The people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
If the history of science shows us anything, it”s that we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance “God”.
Everybody has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all human cultures have it. It gives consolation and comfort. It fosters togetherness in groups. It satisfies our yearning to understand why we exist.
A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter.
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists and may never grow out of it.
Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived - Oscar Wilde
Voltaire - “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Einstein said “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed’.
‘People say we need religion when what they really mean is that we need police” - H L Mencken.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents.
Their whole education has led them to view natural disasters as bound up with human afffairs, paybacks for human misdemeanours rather than anything so impersonal as plate tectonics. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fog for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little sins to the level of cosmic significance.
What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?
The atonement’s ubiquitous familiarity has dulled our objectivity.
Unpalatable - difficult to put up with or accept (Difficult or unpalatable questions)
Odious - extremely unpleasant or repulsive
Sanctimonious - making a show of being morally superior to other people
Mollify enmities - appease the anger or anxiety of opposition or hostility
Assiduously - showing great care and perserverance
A moral and intellectual emergency
Principle of abrogation
Crass insensitivity
Unfairly demonised (opposite is lionised)
Minds addled by nonsense
Overweening = excessive confidence or pride
Inscrutable - impossible to understand or interpret
It subverts science and saps the intellect.
The unmistakeable trademark of the faith-based moraliser is to care passoniately about people what other people do (or even think) in private.
If you take religion away, people truculently ask, what are you going to put in its place?
Even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst - none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true.
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive - Bertrand Russell
Being dead will be no different from being unborn.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
Catholic mythology is just shamelessly invented.
Atonement, the cental doctrine of Christianity, is vicious and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitious familiarity which has dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment - thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as ‘Christ-killers’.
Emily Dickinson: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
Quantum mechanics makes brilliantly successful predictions about the real world.
There are 2 interpretations of quantum theory:
1/ MANY WORLDS - populates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes, existing in parallel and mutually undetectable except through the narrow porthole of quantum-mechanical experiments. In some of these universes I am already dead. And so on.
2/ COPENHAGEN INTERPREATION - equally preposterous and shatteringly paradoxical. Contradicts common sense: all that exists before we open the box (Schrodinger’s cat) is a probability. As soon as we open the box, the wave function collapses and we are left with the single event: the cat is dead, or the cat is alive. Until we opened the box, it was neither dead nor alive.
Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are composed almost entirely of empty space.
