There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the impact of challenging beliefs and the viral nature of thought-provoking discussions.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins shares an experience from a lecture where a student posed a challenging question about the possibility of being wrong. He highlights how this moment resonated with many people, demonstrating the importance of questioning beliefs and engaging in intellectual discourse. The reference to the student's background at a 'ludicrous religious institution' adds to the complexity of the discussion, emphasizing the tension between faith and reason.
In practice
In a lecture on critical thinking, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of questioning assumptions.
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.
It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.
Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers.
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