Richard Dawkins

I think that [Jay] Gould\'s separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it\'s a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf.

God\'s existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.

I think nobody would claim that random genetic drift is capable of producing adaptation, that is to say the illusion of design. Random genetic drift can\'t produce wings that are good at flying, or eyes that are good at seeing, or legs that are good at running. But random genetic drift probably is very important in driving evolution at the molecular genetic level.

Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.

Creationists and Holocaust deniers are both very similar - both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of Holocaust deniers it\'s more recent history, but in both cases the evidence - in favour of the Holocaust and evolution - is simply overwhelming. That doesn\'t mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history.

Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn\'t probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.

There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe\'s age or of how living organisms are related to each other.

God is the answer to all of those \"How must it have come to be\" questions.

That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.

We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it\'s like the difference between Matthew and Luke\'s Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human and a chimp, it\'s like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.

I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.

I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.

There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology - relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes.

I\'m easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else\'s head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time.

What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.

What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he\'d save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day.

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.

What I can\'t understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you\'re shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

Good and evil - I don\'t believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.

St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a deion of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.

You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don\'t go near the edge of the cliff, or don\'t pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

I think that\'s the mother and father of all cop-outs. It\'s an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now [Francis] Collins says, \"Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this.\" Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don\'t do that. Scientists say, \"We\'re working on it. We\'re struggling to understand.\"

If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.

Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.

The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin ion or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That\'s the opposite of saving his genes.

There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.