The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose – and that means evolution. Richard Dawkins
The evidence for evolution is above all positive, it’s enthralling, it’s exciting, it is the greatest show on Earth. Richard Dawkins, lecture New York Academy of Sciences October 2009, Youtube 1.24.35
It was Darwin and Wallace who saw the principle of artificial selection that everybody understood could be generalised to Nature. ibid.
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. ibid.
The evolution of the animal just tracks the environmental change. ibid.
Wallace undoubtedly had the same idea … while out in the Far East; he was just recovering from malaria … He remembered reading Malthus … He made the analogy between artificial selection and natural selection - everything the same as Darwin … Wallace undoubtedly deserves equal credit. Richard Dawkins, interview Joan Bakewell Hay Festival 2017, Youtube 56.57
The fact of your own existence is the most unbelievable fact you will ever be asked to believe. On one planet – possibly the only one planet in the entire universe – the laws of physics which elsewhere produce nothing more interesting than bits of rock and sand and water etc. on one planet the laws of physics filtered through a very strange and particular process called Evolution by Natural Selection produced an outstanding array of complex, beautiful, elegant things which carry a gigantic illusion of design. Richard Dawkins, lecture Duke University October 2010
The chairman asked him, [Cardinal George Pell] Did he accept that humans were descended from Apes? And he said yes, from Neanderthals. (We’re not descended from Neanderthals, we’re cousins of Neanderthals, I told him that.) And he said more or less well how can we be cousins if they’re extinct? Richard Dawkins, with Lawrence Krauss, Australian National University June 2017
Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place … the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker, that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802
Again if this was the plan, was it made by someone who likes us? ... And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? As part of what plan was that? Christopher Hitchens, lecture 6th October 2009
The planner must be either very capricious, really toying with his creation ... or very cruel and very callous or just perhaps very different, or some combination of all of the above. ibid.
It will not be humans that watch the sun’s demise six billion years from now. Any creatures that then do exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoeba. ibid.
It’s some plan, isn’t it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off. Christopher Hitchens v Rabbi David Wolpe, Boston 2010
Once you assume a creator and a plan it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well ... And over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p8
After Darwin, God’s role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws. Daniel C Dennett
Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90% and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past. Daniel C Dennett, Freedom Evolves
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be ‘informavores’, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future. ibid.
Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s ‘Being greater than which nothing can be conceived’, it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. Daniel C Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolutions and the Meaning of Life
To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant – inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. ibid.
Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Daniel Dennett
This century will be called Darwin’s century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance – at the instigation of fear. Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. Robert Ingersoll
See this egg: it is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned. Denis Diderot, Le Reve de l’Alembert
The process of chemical evolution necessary for life is not peculiar to our planet alone. Horizon: Message in the Rocks, BBC 1979
They insist that animals and man were created separately only ten thousand years ago. And that evolutionary theory is not more scientific than what they call Scientific Creationism. They demand their right by law to have it taught in public schools. Horizon: Did Darwin Get it Wrong? BBC 1981
Jean-Baptiste Lemarck: fifty years before Darwin, Lemarck lived in Paris ... He described a type of evolution with great obscurity and even greater length. ibid.
There are very few point mutations to distinguish us from the chimps. ibid.
The wildlife of the Galapagos inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Horizon: Wings of Angels, BBC 1999
In 1947 David Lack was confirmed into the Church of England. He became a leading force in the re-emergence of Darwinism, which followed the Second World War. ibid.
It’s long been known that millions of years ago one special creature walked here. These are fossilized footsteps from the dawn of mankind: the oldest footprints made by our human ancestor. For years scientists have been convinced that whatever creature walked here would hold the key to the biggest mystery of all evolution: why it is human beings have evolved to be so different, so unlike all the other animals? Now a new discovery may just provide the answer to that question. The Trouble is, it’s not what anyone had expected. Horizon: The Ape That Took Over the World, BBC 2001