Root of All Evil? (2006 TV Movie)

Richard Dawkins: Self

Quotes 

• Richard Dawkins : I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist, Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes Religion."

• Richard Dawkins : If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since He is judge and jury as well as execution victim.

• Richard Dawkins : The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, an ethnic cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide.

• Ted Haggard : We fully embrace the scientific method, as American Evangelicals. And we think, as time goes along, as we discover more and more facts, that we'll learn more and more about how God created the heavens and the earth.

  Richard Dawkins : The scientific method clearly demonstrates that the world is four and a half billion years old. I mean, do you accept that?

  Ted Haggard : Yeah, you know what you're doing, is you are, you are accepting some of the views that are accepted in some portions of the scientific community as fact, where in, in fact, your grandchildren might listen to the tape of you saying that and laugh at you?

  Richard Dawkins : [dead serious]  Do you want to bet?

• Ted Haggard : Sometimes it's hard for a human being to study the ear, or study the eye, and think that happened by accident.

  Richard Dawkins : I beg your pardon, did you say by accident?

  Ted Haggard : Yeah.

  Richard Dawkins : What do you mean, by accident?

  Ted Haggard : That the eye just formed itself somehow.

  Richard Dawkins : Who says it did?

  Ted Haggard : Well, some evolutionists say it did.

  Richard Dawkins : Not a single one that I've ever met.

  Ted Haggard : Really.

  Richard Dawkins : Really. You obviously know nothing about the subject of evolution.

  Ted Haggard : Or maybe you haven't met the people I have.

  [chuckles] 

  Ted Haggard : But you see, you do understand, you do understand that this issue right here, of intellectual arrogance, is the reason why people like you have a difficult problem with people of faith. I don't communicate an air of superiority over the people because I know so much more, and if you only read the books I know, and if you only knew the scientists I knew, then you would be great like me. Well, sir, there could be many things that you know well. There are other things that you don't know well. As you age, you'll find yourself wrong on some things, right on some other things. But please, in the process of it, don't be arrogant.

• Richard Dawkins : Oh, but of course, the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it?

  [in a challenging tone] 

  Richard Dawkins : Symbolic? So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a nonexistent individual. Nobody - not brought up in the faith - could reach any verdict but; "barking mad".

• [Preparing to meet Pastor Ted Haggard] 

  Richard Dawkins : This man has a hotline to God... *and* George W. Bush.