Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

by Richard Dawkins

beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.

The very word science is best avoided, because ‘ordinary people’ find it threatening.*2 When I protest, I am rebuked for my ‘elitism’. A terrible word, but maybe not such a terrible thing? There’s a great difference between an exclusive snobbery, which no one should condone, and a striving to help people raise their game and swell the elite. A calculated dumbing down is the worst, condescending and patronizing. When I said this in a recent lecture in the United States, a questioner at the end, no doubt with a warm glow in his white male heart, had the remarkable cheek to suggest that dumbing down might be especially necessary to bring ‘minorities and women’ to science.

intelligent design cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, for it begs the question of its own origin.

I am much more wedded to the general idea that the question should be properly put than I am to any particular answer.