It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
A man was walking on a beach throwing stranded starfish into the water.
A boy watching this, went up to the man and said, “In the total scheme of
things your throwing a few starfish into the sea will make no difference.”
The man turns to him as he is throwing another stranded starfish into the water and says,
“It’ll make a difference to this one.”
— unknown
Whatever the reason, words mean what they say.
— William O. Douglas
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
— William Shakespeare
Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we
suppose, but queerer than one can suppose.
— J. B. S. Haldane
Each one has his own world and space, hidden from all other eyes,
with the power and magic of his own moons and galaxies.
— Bertil Malmberg
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.
Which of the two has the greater view?
— Victor Hugo
We hope to explain the entire universe in a single simple formula
that you can wear on your T-shirt.
— Leon Lederman
Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.
— Hector-Louis Berlioz
The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by
an ugly fact.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
The field cannot well be seen from within the field.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scientists inhabit quite an inhuman world, and so they tend to believe in a universe beyond people. And young people destined to become good scientists tend to be more curious about the universe around them than about other people.
— Jerry Ostriker (Astrophysicist)
— The proof for the validation of any system cannot be established from within the system.
1930’s Kurt Gödel — Incompleteness theorem:
John Boslough comment:— There must be something outside the theoretical framework — whether the framework is mathematical, verbal or visual
{my comment >> includes philosophy, belief system, or religion}
— against which a confirming or disconfirming test could be made. Nor, by extension, could such a theory be invalidated since by definition it would be nothing more than a metaphysical statement of conjectural assumption.
Any theory by its very nature requires for its validation a larger reference frame.
If such a reference frame existed, then the theory could not be considered comprehensive. “God has always seemed to be just around the corner” in trying to arrive at a theory of everything {probably not possible}
— The universe may not have just one Great Secret but many, many Secrets
— Science is never ending.
The universe, like natural selection, is not only wonderfully indifferent but has not the merest afterthought about the fate of itself, much less about the fate of the human race.
What do we see when we look out there?
Probably but a small corner of a vast evolutionary process of which we are only remotely aware, a tiny and accidental twitch of something incalculably more immense falling within our view … all with or without beginning, yet perhaps without creation.
— John Boslough
– doubting “Big Bang” theory.
One person’s “truth” is someone else’s “lies” and the most ardent
theist becomes an atheist when he regards other people’s Gods and this divisiveness of religion is the cause of most of the world’s conflicts today.
Every modern charter of rights runs counter to the values and laws of the root of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, the Old Testament, which has been described by Noam Chomsky as “the most genocidal book ever written”, and present day theologians spend their time “rationalizing” its contents so as to embrace modern concepts of justice. As for the Catholics, the Pope still insists that the prime qualification for leadership in his church lies between the legs instead of between the ears!
— Owen Fauvel
Fideism refers to believing something on the basis of faith, or emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons. As a fideist I don’t think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul.
More than that I think the better arguments are on the side of the atheists.
So it is a case of quixotic emotional belief that really is against evidence.
If you have strong emotional reasons for metaphysical belief and it’s not sharply contradicted by science or logical reasoning, you have a right to make a leap of faith if it provides sufficient satisfaction. (1996)
— Gardner
quote
I have revisited some folk wisdom lately; one of my edited
proverbs is “Nothing fails like success,” because you do not learn anything from
it. The only thing we ever learn from is failure. Success only confirms our superstitions.
For some strange reason which I do not understand at all a
small subculture arose in Western Europe which legitimated failure. Science is the only subculture in which failure is legitimate.
— Kenneth Boulding
Naturalism and Religious Experience 