Belief Quotes - Page 16

[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]

If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.

In the search for truth,
what you believe matters less
than how you believe.

Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence, and to suspend our judgment when we have not.

God resides most strongly and evidently where science has not yet progressed to go... And if this is true then it follows that God resides everywhere and in everything.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.

Nobody wants to look like a fool. Nine times out of ten, that
reason alone keeps people from allowing themselves to believe.

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

(John 11:25-26)

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.

Lihat, ini Arok, yang tetap mempertahankan Tumapel. Dia dan pasukannya akan mempertahankannya sampai titik darah terakhir. Bukan karena imbalan uang, emas dan perak dan singgasana. Hanya karena kesetiaan pada janji.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.