Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the limitation of attributing the origins of the universe to an external intelligence, emphasizing the need for empirical understanding.
Richard Dawkins critiques the idea of explaining the Big Bang through an external intelligence or deity, suggesting that doing so doesn't actually enhance our understanding. Instead, it merely replaces one mystery with another, as we still remain clueless about the origins of that supposed intelligence. This perspective encourages an emphasis on scientific inquiry and understanding of the universe based on evidence rather than reliance on supernatural explanations.
In practice
During a philosophy discussion on the origin of the universe, this quote might illustrate skepticism towards supernatural explanations.
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.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.
That's one of the ironies of our time: Right when we're on the edge of serious improvements in health care, we're also cooking the planet.
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
I argue that for every country to have an independent fuel cycle is the wrong way to go. Because any country which has a complete fuel cycle is a latent nuclear weapons country, in the sense that it is not far from making a nuclear weapon.
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
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