They’re also fed stories about God and about Father Christmas. And somehow children usually got off the ordinary magic spells of fairy tales. And they get off Father Christmas. They don’t get off God. And there’s something a bit different. And I don’t quite understand what it is. Children do seem to have some capacity to filter what they’re told and to work about, well obviously that’s not really true. But it’s a good story. I wonder if it’s to do with the seriousness of the tone of voice that’s adopted by the adult who is telling you about it. Richard Dawkins, In Confidence 2010
I mean I think the closest is the idea that the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true. That does to me seem to need some kind of explanation, if it’s true ... It certainly doesn’t suggest to me in any way a creative intelligence because you’re still left with the problem of explaining where that come from. Richard Dawkins, The Four Horsemen: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens
9A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence, who in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation ... A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities are confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion p18
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ibid. p31
It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. ibid. p32
The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with his own superiority over rival gods and the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. ibid. p37
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. ibid. p125
A God capable of simultaneously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being – and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies. ibid. p149
God’s monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind. ibid. p243
What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened – they probably didn’t. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role force the same evil monster, whether fact or fiction, on the rest of us. ibid. p248
God in the sense defined is an delusion ... a pernicious delusion. Richard Dawkins, lecture The God Delusion, Lynchburg Virginia
God was only joking after all. Tempting Abraham and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. ibid.
More and more of us realise there is no God and yet religion still has a hold over us. I think ideas of saints and sinners, heaven and hell, still shape our thinking. I want to give you a scientific alternative. Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life I: Sin, Channel 4 2012
What happens as we move on and leave religion behind? What will guide and inspire us in a world free from all gods? How can an atheist find meaning in life? ibid.
Some people think that if we get rid of God and all religious values all that’s left is anarchy. But I want to show that there is order without religion. ibid.
A more difficult question – What if anything can take God’s place? Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life II, Channel 4 2012
If there is no God, what is the Meaning of Life? Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life III Channel 4 2012
Atheists may think they’ve given up God but it’s only human to cling to the idea that things happen for a reason. ibid.
Rather than adapt to evidence, many of us it seems remain trapped in ways of thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors. Irrational belief, from dowsing to psychic clairvoyance, has roots in early mankind’s habit of attributing spirit and intention to natural phenomena such as water, the sun, a rock or the sea ... Even in the twenty-first century, despite all science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe, the human mind remains a wanton story-teller creating intention in the randomness of reality. Richard Dawkins, Enemies of Reason
It’s worse than that: the argument for God starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain – intelligence, complexity, it comes to the same thing – and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. Whereas evolution by natural selection [is] an explanation. It really does start simply and become complex. Richard Dawkins, interview Sunday Telegraph 26th September 1999
To think that the idea of God intervening in this conjuring trick way is blasphemous. Richard Dawkins, interviewing Wendy Richards, Concerned Women For America
Jefferson and Washington and their colleagues were deists or atheists but what they were passionate about is that American having been founded by immigrants fleeing religious persecution should never have to undergo with that again. And the only way they could achieve that was by setting up a secular state with no state religion. They must be spinning in their graves at what is happening in America today which is rapidly degenerating into a theocracy. Richard Dawkins, interviewing Ian McEwan
It’s not helpful to postulate a creator because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation. Richard Dawkins