Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist
"Purely Personal Prejudices"
Strictly Personal (1953)
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 258
Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist
"Purely Personal Prejudices"
Strictly Personal (1953)
Robert M. Sapolsky (1957) American endocrinologist
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist. Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesn't mean anything at all. You can reduce how an impala leaps to a bunch of biomechanical equations. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations, and that doesn't reduce in the slightest our capacity to be moved by a gazelle leaping or Bach thundering. There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed.
The more important reason why people shouldn't be afraid is, we're never going to inadvertently go and explain everything. We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything. When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist
1896
September
The Degraded Status of Woman in the Bible
Free Thought Magazine
Chicago
14
540
http://books.google.com/books?id=TfOfAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA540&dq=%22I+have+endeavored+to+dissipate%22
“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”
Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer
“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author
Interview with Diane Sawyer, as quoted in "Stephen Hawking on Religion: 'Science Will Win'" on ABC World News (7 June 2010) http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/stephen-hawking-religion-science-win/story?id=10830164
Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 85-86
Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy
Part 4: Divine Justice and Injustice; Opening sentence
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy
Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. IV Section I - Speculation on the Doctrine of the Depravity of Human Reason
John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Part 2 “Four Subjective Arguments”, Chapter 5 “The Argument from Interventions (and Miracles, Prayers, and Witnesses)” (pp. 88-89)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)