Richard Dawkins

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Natural selection is anything but random.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.