Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the mutual conflict between science and religion, suggesting that both hinder each other’s understanding.
Richard Dawkins emphasizes the detrimental effects that both science and religion can have on each other. He argues that while science seeks to explain the world through evidence and reason, religion can encourage complacency with simplistic answers, preventing individuals from appreciating the depth and wonder of genuine scientific explanations. This relationship illustrates how adherence to unproven beliefs may obstruct a more profound understanding of reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate on the relationship between science and religion.
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.
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.
Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month.
The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
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