Quotes Flashcards
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, ___________ pointless indifference.”
–Richard Dawkins
nothing but
“The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the ___________.”
- Richard Dawkins
Apparent Design
“I have never been an ________ in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”
- Charles Darwin
Atheist
The intention is to ______, rather than to pass judgment, on the phenomena of religion.
- Ninian Smart
describe
Evolution is the ________ of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we [ultimately] are. It influences not just our thoughts, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological [scientific] theory
- Mary Midgley
creation - myth
Whether we feel ourselves [1] surrounded by a spiritual world, [2] or guided by the one God,
[3] or striving toward nirvana, or [4] alone in an empty universe, WE [my capitals] as religious people asking spiritual questions have tried to see ________ our senses. Is it just
imagination or is it a holy power that impels us?”
-Ninian Smart
beyond
The traditional conception of philosophy, which was dominant throughout the history of Western thought, was that philosophy can investigate the content of our beliefs, including the __________ of theological beliefs.
- Michael Peterson
Truth or falsity
Logic requires that religious trust can be either well placed or misplaced as can
nonreligious trust, since beliefs about the divine are–-as all other beliefs–-either ________ but not both at once. It follows, therefore, that when two beliefs disagree about what is divine, one or both of them must be (at least partly) false.
- Roy A. Clouser
True or False
A religious belief is any belief in something or other as divine. ‘Divine’ means having the status of not depending on anything else. . . . All [religions] believe
that the divine is whatever is _________.
-Roy A. Clouser
Just there
Pantheistic traditions insist that what is wrong with people is their attachment to the
illusory world as it is encountered in ordinary experience by reason…. _________ they say, fails to recognize that logical thinking is also part of the everyday world of illusion. As such, logical thinking is part of the deception that prevents people from discovering the divine unity of all reality
- Roy A. Clouser
Logical Criticism
That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your ____.
- Martin Luther
God
That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical
researches is as little to be expected as that we, to avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer
to give up breathing altogether. There will therefore always be ______ in the world.
- Immanuel Kant
Metaphysics
The primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community, supplying the community with a continuously evolving __________
- Lindberg
Social Charter
If such non-literal, non-chronological usage seems strange
to us, that is _______ and our challenge to understand. The text [the Bible] is, after all,
our teacher
-Lloyd R. Bailey
Our Problem
Neither a philosophy of the ________ nor a philosophy of the __________
will do for our time. Only an approach that is resolutely guided by the question ‘What is what?’ will avoid reading mysteries into the facts, as well as refrain from impoverishing them by
reduction to something less than experience attests them to be.
- Feigl
Something more
Nothing But
all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system . . . all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so __________
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand
-Bertrand Russell
Nearly Certain
Philosophers long made a mummy of science. When they finally unwrapped the cadaver
and saw the remnants of an historical process of becoming and discovering, they created
for themselves a ____________ That happened around ____
Crisis of rationality
1960
Conflation . . . simply means the collapsing of distinct items in such a way that their differences are apparently lost. . . . [It is] science and ______ into an undifferentiated
smudge . . . careless commingling of science with _______ . . . a tangled muddle.”
Belief
Belief
__________, scientific skeptics have uncritically fused [conflated] the scientific method with scientism, a belief system that assumes, without any scientific demonstration, that science is the only appropriate way to look at things.
-John Haught
without usually being aware of it
______________ theologians always bring at least implicit cosmological assumptions to their talk about God, and it is only honest that they acknowledge this fact.
-John Haught
Whether they are aware of it or not
I think philosophically that one should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely, that . . . evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain
_____________ which at some level cannot be proven empirically. I guess we all knew that, but I think that we’re all much more sensitive to these facts now.
-Michael Ruse
A priori
or
Metaphysical Assumption
The first major challenge to religion in an age of science is the ______ of the methods of science
-Ian Barbour
Success
The naturalistic hypothesis arising from scientific knowledge holds that the powerful
emotions of religious experience are entirely __________, that they evolved as
part of the programmed activity of the brain favoring survival of the tribe and individual.
-E.O. Wilson
Neurobiological
No such conflict should exist [between science & religion] because each subject has a
legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority––and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as ________’).
-Stephen Jay Gould
NOMA
non overlapping magisteria
