"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all"
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Dawkins is picking a fight with a particular kind of mental comfort: the relief you get when a question stops being uncomfortable. His jab isn’t just “religion is false,” but “religion trains you to stop asking.” The phrase “satisfied with answers” targets the psychological payoff of closure, the way a tidy story can feel like knowledge even when it’s only a stopping point. By calling them “not really answers at all,” he’s policing the boundary between explanation and placeholder: “God did it” as a conversational period where science would insist on a comma.
The intent is strategic. Dawkins, writing from the authority of a working scientist, frames the dispute as epistemic rather than merely theological. He’s arguing that religion doesn’t simply compete with science on content; it competes on habits of mind. That makes the critique bigger, and more threatening: it casts religion as a cultural technology for stabilizing uncertainty, protecting communities from the anxiety of “we don’t know,” and sometimes from the political and moral consequences of not knowing.
Subtext: accepting certain religious answers isn’t neutral; it’s training. If you internalize that some questions are settled by tradition or revelation, you learn deference as a virtue and curiosity as a temptation. That’s why the line hits: it’s less an attack on faith as private meaning than on faith as an institutionalized shortcut.
Context matters, too. Dawkins emerged as a leading voice of the “New Atheism” era, when debates over evolution education, fundamentalism, and post-9/11 religious politics made the costs of bad epistemology feel urgent. His sentence is a manifesto for intellectual restlessness, and a warning about how easily comfort can masquerade as truth.
The intent is strategic. Dawkins, writing from the authority of a working scientist, frames the dispute as epistemic rather than merely theological. He’s arguing that religion doesn’t simply compete with science on content; it competes on habits of mind. That makes the critique bigger, and more threatening: it casts religion as a cultural technology for stabilizing uncertainty, protecting communities from the anxiety of “we don’t know,” and sometimes from the political and moral consequences of not knowing.
Subtext: accepting certain religious answers isn’t neutral; it’s training. If you internalize that some questions are settled by tradition or revelation, you learn deference as a virtue and curiosity as a temptation. That’s why the line hits: it’s less an attack on faith as private meaning than on faith as an institutionalized shortcut.
Context matters, too. Dawkins emerged as a leading voice of the “New Atheism” era, when debates over evolution education, fundamentalism, and post-9/11 religious politics made the costs of bad epistemology feel urgent. His sentence is a manifesto for intellectual restlessness, and a warning about how easily comfort can masquerade as truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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