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January 24, 1936 Dear Phyllis, I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here is my answer: Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced…
Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their…
I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vicenzio Galilei of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before you. Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors of the Universal Chris¬ tian Commonwealth against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Holy…
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians [astrologers], and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.
The "overbeliefs" of an enlightened man rest on the firmest basis of reality available. This he finds in the scientific picture of the universe of his age. On this foundation of natural knowledge he erects a unique unproven structure of "overbeliefs" concerning his universe, origin, life, hereafter, religion and God…
In principle, there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings that humans can imagine. However, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members—ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on—have in common two…
In the beginning was the singularity, and the singularity was infinitely dense and infinitely hot, And the singularity expanded and the singularity cooled and there was chaos, And of the primeval atom was born the Universe. And the Universe was matter and antimatter, and baryogenesis was violated and matter…
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed…
Death, to the Zhodani, is not a complete ending. The "evil" (that is, failure of duty) of the individual spirit will be lost. The "good" of the spirit will merge for a time with the universal energy field, the Tavrian, and then return to another member of the race. The more dutiful the spirit, the more personality…
Banks may have displayed a lack of anger at his diagnosis, but that does not mean that his righteous ire is extinguished. As we chat, he frequently loops off into hilarious denunciations. "I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow…
I have decked my soundproof booth with boughs of holly and, of course, poinsettia or, some say, poin-settia. Though it is actually pronounced pon-see-ha. Did you know that it is a Mexican plant? It is. Named for the ambassador to Mexico, James Poinsett, it was brought to our country in 1828 and quickly became favored…
We may distinguish the progress of each science as it is in itself, which has no other limit than the number of truths it includes within its sphere, and the progress of a nation in each science, a progress which is regulated first by the number of men who are acquainted with its leading and most important truths, and…
The spirit which animated the reformers did not introduce a real freedom of sentiment. Each religion, in the country in which it prevailed, had no indulgence but for certain opinions. Meanwhile, as the different creeds were opposed to each other, few opinions existed that had not been attacked or supported in some…
The same motives which had roused the minds of men from their long lethargy, must also have directed their exertions. Reason could not be appealed to for the decision of questions, of which opposite interests had compelled the discussion. Religion, far from acknowledging its power, boasted of having subjected and…
Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was even odious to it…
Our own view of what is and is not possible in reality affects how we perceive identical evidence. But that view shifts with time, and thus, evidence that might at one point seem meaningless can come to hold a great deal of meaning. Think of how many ideas seemed outlandish when first put forward, seemed so impossible…
My definition of the word believe means to accept an explanation of phys¬ ical phenomena without any experiential evidence. At the outset of my re¬ solve not only to do my own thinking but to keep that thinking concerned only with directly experienced evidence, I resolved to abandon completely all that I ever had been…
As recorded in the stone carvings of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the history of worid society begins with humanity at large knowing nothing of physics. chemistry, or biology. Humans recognized but few safe edibles. Humans had witnessed many lethal poisonings by superficially attractive items plucked from the mysterious…
He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
I don’t think you can refute creationism. Science only explores the natural world, not the supernatural world, and God is a supernatural question. Even creationists will admit that God is supernatural. The question of God is not a question that’s answerable by science because you can’t create an experiment that shows…