1. On the limits of faith for understanding God.
Summary:
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
— Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve, 2009
— Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve, 2009
Carl Sagan, PhD, American astronomer, astrophysicist,& astrobiologist, 1934-1996
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
— Carl Sagan, “Encyclopaedia Galactica,” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, PBS, Episode 12, December 14, 1980
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
— Carl Sagan, “Encyclopaedia Galactica,” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, PBS, Episode 12, December 14, 1980
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist,& revolutionary, 1737-1809
“It is only by the exercise of reason, that man can discover God. Takeaway that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and in this case it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How then is it that those people pretend to reject reason?”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 p70
“It is only by the exercise of reason, that man can discover God. Takeaway that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and in this case it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How then is it that those people pretend to reject reason?”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, New York, 1988 p70
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid. It should be clear that if a person believes in God because he has had certain spiritual experiences, or because the Bible makes so much sense, or because he trusts the authority of the church, he is playing the same game of justification that we all play when claiming to know the most ordinary facts. This is probably a conclusion that many religious believers will want to resist; but resistance is not only futile but incoherent. There is simply no other logical space for our beliefs about the world to occupy. As long as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is–God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen to you, etc.–they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it. And it is only by being so situated that propositions of this sort can influence our subsequent thinking or behavior. As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world(visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence. Indeed, if there were no conceivable change in the world that could get a person to question his religious beliefs, this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon his taking any state of the world into account. He could not claim, therefore, to be representing the world at all.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p63
“The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid. It should be clear that if a person believes in God because he has had certain spiritual experiences, or because the Bible makes so much sense, or because he trusts the authority of the church, he is playing the same game of justification that we all play when claiming to know the most ordinary facts. This is probably a conclusion that many religious believers will want to resist; but resistance is not only futile but incoherent. There is simply no other logical space for our beliefs about the world to occupy. As long as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is–God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen to you, etc.–they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it. And it is only by being so situated that propositions of this sort can influence our subsequent thinking or behavior. As long as a person maintains that his beliefs represent an actual state of the world(visible or invisible; spiritual or mundane), he must believe that his beliefs are a consequence of the way the world is. This, by definition, leaves him vulnerable to new evidence. Indeed, if there were no conceivable change in the world that could get a person to question his religious beliefs, this would prove that his beliefs were not predicated upon his taking any state of the world into account. He could not claim, therefore, to be representing the world at all.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p63
Robert Ingersoll, American lawyer & orator, 1833-1899
“Let us be honest with ourselves. In the presence of countless mysteries; standing beneath the boundless heaven sown thick with constellations; knowing that each grain of sand, each leaf, each blade of grass, asks of every mind the answer-less question; knowing that the simplest thing defies solution; feeling that we deal with the superficial and the relative, and that we are forever eluded by the real, the absolute,–let us admit the limitations of our minds, and let us have the courage and the candor to say: We do not know.”
— Robert Green Ingersoll, Why Am I an Agnostic, 1900 (Anodos Books edition, 2019, p17)
Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, American physician-geneticist, NIH Director, 1950-
“Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a ‘theory’—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Free Press, New York, 2006 p58
“Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a ‘theory’—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Free Press, New York, 2006 p58
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“I concede that one cannot prove the world to be rational. It is certainly possible that, at its deepest level, it is absurd, and we have to accept the existence and features of the world as brute facts that could have been otherwise. Yet the success of science is at the very least strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the rationality of nature. In science, if a certain line of reasoning is successful, we pursue it until we find it to fail.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p191
“I concede that one cannot prove the world to be rational. It is certainly possible that, at its deepest level, it is absurd, and we have to accept the existence and features of the world as brute facts that could have been otherwise. Yet the success of science is at the very least strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the rationality of nature. In science, if a certain line of reasoning is successful, we pursue it until we find it to fail.”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p191