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, ______ blind, pitiless indifference”
nothing but
“the complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the ____”
apparent design
“I have never been an ____ in the sense of denying the existence of a God”
atheist
“the intention is to _______, rather than to pass judgement, on the phenomena of religion”
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. In calling it a “myth”, I am not of course saying that it is a false story. I mean that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth. Is the word religion appropriate to it? This will depend on the sense we give to that very elastic word”
creation-myth
“altogether the history of the religions of the human race has been multiple: often bitter, often noble, often sweet, at times cruel, sometimes beautiful, often ugly. It can teach us many lessons. 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 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?”
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”
truth or falsity
“logic requires that religious trust can be either 1 well placed or 2 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”
truth 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 what is _____”
just there
“[idealistic] 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”
logical criticism
“that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I saw, really your ______”
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 breaking all together. There will therefore always be ______ in our world”
metaphysics
“oral tradition … serves as the principle repository for the collective experience as the general beliefs, attitudes, and values of the community … 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 _______ “
social charter
“if such non-literal, non-chronological usage seems strange to us, that is ________ and our challenge to understand. The text [ bible] is, after all, our teacher”
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”
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”
nearly certain
“philosophers long made a mummy of science. When they finally unwrapped the cadaver and saw the remnants of an historical process of become 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 … [conflation blends] science and _______ into an undifferentiated smudge …. A careless comingling 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”
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”
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 know that, but I think that were all much more sensitive to these facts now. Well, I’ve been very short, but that was my message, and I think its an important one.”
a priori or metaphysical assumption
“the first major challenge to religion in an age of science is the ______ of the methods of science”
success
“the ultimate question: do religion and moral reasoning also have a biological origin? Are they the products of evolution? So stated, the meaning of spiritual authority breaks into two competing possibilities, two competing hypothesis that now appear susceptible to empirical testing. Either humanity is guided by moral principles that were formulated outside human existence, in other words by divine will or natural law, or else humanity has evolved these principles on its own during its long genetic and cultural history … the [metaphysical] 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”
neurobiological
“no such conflict should exist [between science and religion] because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority – and these magisterial do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as ______, or ‘non-overlapping magisterial}. The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). the net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. these two magisterial do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry”
NOMA
