The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.
Interpretation
The concept of supernatural events lacks logical consistency and understanding.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins argues that the notion of supernatural magic and miracles does not hold up to rational scrutiny. He suggests that these ideas are fundamentally illogical and cannot be coherently explained or understood within the frameworks of reason and evidence.
In practice
In a discussion about the validity of religious beliefs, one might quote this to emphasize a scientific perspective.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. For the least sin, it wouldn't take us longTo get so we had no one left to live with.For to be social is to be forgiving.
Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.
Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonymous with having a "powerful personality."
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.
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