Richard Dawkins Quotes About Feelings
-
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.
→ -
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
→ -
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.
→ -
I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
→ -
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
→ -
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.
→ -
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you'd never be confident of things like 'My wife loves me'. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
→ -
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
→ -
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
→ -
On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.
→ -
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
→ -
bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.
→ -
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
→ -
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
→ -
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.
→
Related Authors
-
William Lane Craig Philosopher -
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist -
Lalla Ward Actress -
PZ Myers Scientist -
Bill Nye Educator -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Bill Maher Comedian -
Jerry A. Coyne Professor -
Sam Harris Author -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
John Lennox Mathematician -
Stephen Hawking Physicist -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Douglas Adams Writer -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist