Richard Dawkins(b. 1941)

Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. His books on evolution and the philosophy of science have had significant influence on public understanding of biology and the relationship between science and religion.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Dawkins studied at Oxford and became its first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. His book The Selfish Gene popularized the genecentered view of evolution and introduced the concept of memes.

While known for his criticism of religion, Dawkins has acknowledged that the universe reveals “something stunningly close to the God of the physicists”—a deep structure and beauty that evokes awe. His engagement with questions of cosmic meaning continues to be relevant to discussions of science and transcendence.

Quotations by Richard Dawkins

I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered . . . It may even be a superhuman designer—but, if so, it will almost certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don’t believe for a moment) our universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice, forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe.

Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twentyfirst century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet.