Naturalism Quotes
153 quotes
"Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
"Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality."
"There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,"said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?"
"How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?"
"In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes."
"Napoleon, when hearing about Laplace's latest book, said, 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.'Laplace responds, 'Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)"
"Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing."
"The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it."
"It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence,"said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design."
"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest"
"No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?"
"Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it."
Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power
"The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]"
"If there is a Creator-God, it has used methods of creation that are indistinguishable from nature, it has declined to make itself known for all of recorded history, it doesn't intervene in affairs on earth, and has made itself impossible to observe. Even if you believe in that God... why would you think it would want to be worshiped?"
David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
"The smaller the creature, the bolder its spirit."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks."
"Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them."
"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."
"I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality."
"A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion."
"God is nature’s anti-dote to misery."
"every single explanation that your brain concocts about a certain phenomenon on earth, is merely a virtual hunch of the neurons. Now, when your brain has access to more information, the resulting hunch would be more accurate, than another person who has less access."
"When you don’t have explanation for a certain phenomenon, as a real human, you should suspend judgement, instead of concocting supernatural explanations out of ignorance and primordial fanaticism."
"It is better to be foolish than a dilettante."
"The Human Self is the only friend and savior to all humanity."
"Life is a natural phenomenon – and by mystifying it, one only disgraces its natural beauty."
"Biologically speaking, you are the child of Mother Nature, and neurologically speaking, you are the heirs of immortal bliss."
"There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?"
"It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design."
"The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."
"Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the"
"The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA."
"There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival."
"Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality."
"Somehow creationists keep us naturalists in track to some extent. They are the representation of human stupidity at its extreme. And we need some stupidity in the society for true intellect to be adored."
"Good gods are scarce because the majority of gods are created by evil men"
"Why do religious believers hate unbelievers? The feel threatened by them, they feel besieged by them. Religions consider themselves as separate tribes in their own rights and feel like unbelievers will one day overrun their strongholds"
"Every word that comes after "And the Lord told me. . . “is a pious lie"
"Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?"
"Some people are so stiff and inhumane as the dogma's they believe in"
"Give me something to worship whatever.” Cries the human soul"
"Spiritual leaders, priests and prophets are lamps burning in the dark, seeking meaning for humanity."
"Science cannot disprove god. Science studies the things that are. The eternal question is who or what made them to be"
"There is nothing behind the curtains of religions, people put there whatever their imaginations can fathom"
"Once you believe that god is not a private property of anybody, you are on your way to becoming a new messiah. Maybe your own if not the world's"
"Theology is like assuming that there is a black cat in a dark room where in fact there is no black cat, and endeavoring to study the cat's properties and how it may have evolved from its ancestors."
"The eyes of god are upon you, I mean the eyes of society. We are prisoners of societies in which we live"
"You take away my golden dreams and my visions of paradise, in its place you wake me up and hand me your reasons and facts and crude reality. You have ruined my life. If I commit murder or hang myself, let the god I used to pray to repay you in full."
"If you believe that God is good and that He loves you without regard to whom you are or what you do, you will worship Him wholeheartedly. You will praise him with thanksgiving. If you believe He is angry against you, you will come to him with fear and trying to appease his anger. And you don't know when His anger will be over. Such a god keeps you in a perpetual psychological anguish. That is the typical kind of god we usually worship. That is the typical god approved by authority."
"Each mind conceives god in its own way. There may be as many variation of the god figure as there are people in the world"
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