If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
Interpretation
The word 'miracle' often dismisses curiosity and investigation into natural phenomena that can be explained by science.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins illustrates that labeling something as a 'miracle' can hinder our understanding of the natural world. He uses the example of a medieval peasant who would have viewed a radio as a miracle, highlighting how our perceptions of extraordinary occurrences often reflect our level of knowledge and understanding. Dawkins argues that instead of accepting the miraculous, we should strive to investigate and comprehend the underlying mechanisms of such phenomena.
In practice
In a speech about scientific advancements, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of inquiry over accepting things as miracles.
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.
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
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