From Europe and Elsewhere and A Pen Warmed Up In Hell

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Excerpt from Chapter I, “The Anaesthetic of Familiarity,” of his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow

Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster

A lecture by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec 94).

Richard Dawkins, well-known for his books on evolution, took part in a debate with the Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood, on the existence of God at the Edinburgh science festival last Easter. [Easter ‘92 ed.] The science correspondent of The Observer reported that the “withering” Richard Dawkins clearly believed the “God should be spoken of in the same way as Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy”. He [the correspondent] overheard a gloomy cleric comment on the debate: “That was easy to sum up. Lions 10, Christians nil”.

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The 1996 Humanist of the Year asked this question in a speech accepting the honor from the American Humanist Association.

Richard Dawkins is Oxford’s Professor of Public Understanding of Science. He is the author of The Blind Watchmaker (on which this article is partly based) and Climbing Mount Improbable. He is a Senior Editor of Free Inquiry.

Francis Crick is Kieckhefer Professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, USA. He shared a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

The Rational Habit Of Mind Is A Rare One

Commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine, in 1952