
“The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.”
Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker
[2000, The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, Lee, Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 9780310565703, http://books.google.com/books?id=5kgb7v1qlF4C]
“The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.”
Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker
Part 1, p. 23; As cited in: Meyer, Stephen C. "DNA by design: An inference to the best explanation for the origin of biological information." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1.4 (1998): 551.
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)
“We are all quite capable of believing in anything as long as it's improbable.”
Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s
"The Scientific Aspect of Monte Carlo Roulette" (1894)
“It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.”
Aristotle, Poetics, XXV, quoted by George Eliot in an epigraph to Chapter 41 of Daniel Deronda.
Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 8 (p. 135)
“Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.”
Reported by J. S. Huxley in Evolution in Action, London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.
1950s