Asolis
Jul 09
26

Here are some quotes I like that I’ve come across. :)

When you’ve got a specific theological claim, such as that the earth is only 6,000 years old[...], then science certainly can weigh in on a theological claim. It can say that that specific claim is wrong. We can whittle away at virtually every material claim that religions make, and reduce them to an empirical void — the Catholic Church, for instance, officially goes along with the scientific observations of evolution, and simply adds an untestable, immaterial claim on top of it, that there was some moment of “ensoulment” that corresponds to the literary metaphor of Adam and Eve. Science can’t disprove that, but what it means is that they are diminished to making pointless claims about invisible, unobservable entities being magically added invisibly and immaterially to people at a distant time and place that they cannot name.

-PZ Myers, Numbers and Nelson dislocate shoulders with strenuous back-patting — July 25, 2009

If you believe you’re going to be resurrected after you die, which I think is a fairy tale, this is ultimately a dissatisfying way to promote life, and I don’t think that it’s going to get us anywhere as a culture. I think it’s a barrier that cultural evolution has to take us past. We need to move in the direction of accepting the universe as it truly is, rather than as we wish it to be.

-Natalie Angier, GOD VS. SCIENCE: A Debate Between Natalie Angier and David Sloan Wilson — April 12, 2007

Frame an argument and your audience may support science for a day. Teach your audience to distinguish between science and anti-science and they’ll support science for a lifetime.

-Mark Hoofnagle, Cranks cry persecution, Nisbet listens — November 25, 2008

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

-Richard Dawkins, To Live at All Is Miracle Enough (Unweaving the Rainbow)

You don’t use science to show that you’re right. You use science to become right.

-Randall Munroe, xkcd (Science Valentine)

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