“Doubt is the first step in gaining knowledge; without it, we could not progress. Doubt means we are questioning our beliefs and prepared to learn new things.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The first way to know something is, of course, through personal experience. You know that your living room is painted green because you’ve been in your living room and saw that it was green. (I won’t worry here about things like how you know you aren’t dreaming or insane or such.) Similarly you know what a bird is, how gravity works (again, in an everyday sense), and how to get to the nearest shopping mall, all by direct experience.
The second way to know things is by authority. That is, you rely on some source of information, believing it to be reliable, when you have no experience of your own. So almost every person who has gone to school believes that the earth goes around the sun, even though very few people would be able to tell you how anybody could even detect that motion. You are relying on authority if, when asked if you know the way to San Jose, you answer yes and pull out a map. You might be able to personally test the map’s reliability by using it to navigate to San Jose, but until you do you are relying on authority. Many people believe democracy is superior to other forms of government even though they haven’t lived under any other type. They rely on the authority of textbooks and politicians, and perhaps on verbal or pictorial descriptions of what it’s like in other societies. Of course other societies do the same, and most of their defenders rely on authority.”
Michael J. Behe
“Science itself is dead. The university has become a brothel of third-party funding.
I mean that quite seriously — a colleague of mine once said this when her rector at a university in the Ruhr region drove away in a sports car wearing a gold chain.
We each have our little room there, and we make a career if we let ourselves be used by whoever provides the funding.
In other words, the agenda and the criteria for quality are outsourced. The criterion of truth becomes corrupted by the criterion of external funding.
Not everyone who accepts external funding behaves this way, of course. But the metaphor of the brothel was meant to illustrate that love can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought — and that science can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought.”
Matthias Burchardt
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Christopher Hitchens
“We see entire societies suddenly fixate their thoughts on a single topic and lose their minds; millions of people are simultaneously gripped by a single delusion until their attention is captured by a new absurdity more fascinating than the first.”
Charles MacKay
“The first bachelor generation is just climbing the university chairs. People who are perfectly trained in their craft, who have internalized the hegemonic ideology, and who are good advertising media for a system that needs academic confirmation in order to be able to continue to say ‘democracy’. This generation already determines what ‘good science’ is. It fills journals, conference programs, and so eventually textbooks, lectures, and seminars – with topics, perspectives, and terms it has taken from the political agenda and the tenders linked to it, and which it doesn’t question because it couldn’t learn that anywhere.”
Michael Meyen
“Children are taught in their geography books, when too young to apprehend aright the meaning of such things, that the world is a great globe revolving around the Sun, and the story is repeated continuously, year by year, till they reach maturity, at which time they generally become so absorbed in other matters as to be indifferent as to whether the teaching be true or not, and, as they hear of nobody contradicting it, they presume that it must be the correct thing, if not to believe at least to receive it as a fact. They thus tacitly give their assent to a theory which, if it had first been presented to them at what are called ‘years of discretion,’ they would at once have rejected. The consequences of evil-teaching, whether in religion or in science, are far more disastrous than is generally supposed, especially in a luxurious laisser faire age like our own. The intellect becomes weakened and the conscience seared.”
David Wardlaw Scott
“As an engineer of many years standing, I saw that this absurd allowance is only permitted in school books. No engineer would dream of allowing anything of the kind. I have projected many miles of railways and many more of canals and the allowance has not even been thought of, much less allowed for. This allowance for curvature means this – that it is 8” for the first mile of a canal, and increasing at the ratio by the square of the distance in miles; thus a small navigable canal for boats, say 30 miles long, will have, by the above rule an allowance for curvature of 600 feet. Think of that and then please credit engineers as not being quite such fools. Nothing of the sort is allowed. We no more think of allowing 600 feet for a line of 30 miles of railway or canal, than of wasting our time trying to square the circle”
W. Winckler
“Now, my predecessor loved precision. His matrix consisted only of pedantic facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to understand that you don’t give a damn about facts. It’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one inside here. And you people believe the craziest shit. And why? What confirms your fictions and makes them real? Feelings.”
Neil Patrick Harris
“Modern Astrophysics, Quantum Physics, and Astronomy are, in fact, simply repackaged occultism, and they have been passed off as modern science for many decades. This is known as Scientism. The entire Big Bang Myth is simply a Satanic lie which was necessaty in order to transmit other occult lies, such as The Myth of Gravity, Evolution, Heliocentrism, and eventually, give credence and traction to the idea of alien life. The primary occult ideology at the basis of all this is the idea of Cosmic Pantheism. The Big Bang Myth reinforces the idea that The Cosmos evolved from a pin prick of substance, and expanded out for billions of years, which is identical to the Kabbalistic occult teachings at the core of Pantheism.”
Gregory Lessing Garrett