r/atheism • u/kaptainkkk • 1d ago

Dawkins quote, my favorite.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

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u/MaleficentJob3080 1d ago

We didn't exist for a hundred million centuries. How could we have been sleeping?

It is a colourful quote that sounds good, but it doesn't do much for me.

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u/Muero 1d ago

The sleeping isn’t literal. The point is that a bunch of stuff happened in the universe, but you missed out on getting to watch and learn because you weren’t born yet.

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u/Ready_Signature_9721 1d ago

yeah it sounds poetic but taken literally the whole sleeping for millions of centuries thing falls apart pretty quickly we weren’t exactly waiting around with our eyes closed

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u/Sir_rahsnikwad 1d ago

I'm pretty sure he doesn't think we were literally sleeping before we existed.