Michael Augros > Quotes

“Not believing in anything better means we don’t have to do anything about it.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“The distinction between mass and weight is always a little tricky, since they are exactly proportional to each other. Monteith made it easy. Out in space, you can lift a barbell off the floor of the shuttle much more easily than you can on Earth, because its attraction to Earth is diminished at that distance. But you can’t roll it on the floor any faster than you can on Earth, because the mass does not change with distance from Earth. The barbell’s weight is due to a certain attraction to Earth (the nearest significantly large body), but mass is a resistance to acceleration that belongs to the barbell in itself, independently of the barbell’s location, and regardless of the direction in which you attempt to accelerate it. “Weight is attraction; mass is shove resistance”, he would say. (I could rattle off a bunch of those pithy one-liners that have helped me through my subsequent courses in physics.) When a fellow student of mine said he was still confused about the difference, Monteith’s eyes bulged as he strode over to my neighbor’s desk. “Would you rather lift my car or push it if you had to do one or the other?” “Pushing it is easier.” “Then mass isn’t weight, is it? The mass of my car resists your push. The weight resists your lift.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“The business of an animal is not only to reproduce (which is common to all living things), but they all of them also participate in a kind of knowledge (some more, some less, some very little indeed), because they have sense-perception, which is a kind of knowledge. But the worth we assign it hinges on whether we look at it compared with intelligence or with the class of lifeless things. Compared with intelligence it seems like almost nothing to have a share of touch and taste alone, but compared with the absence of all sensation it appears a great thing. For even this form of knowledge would appear a precious thing compared with lying in a state of death or of nonexistence. —Aristotle, Generation of Animals”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it: “To reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.”1”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“The nature of the stone, as we find it in the stone itself, rigidly shuts out all other beings and their properties. The stone is only itself and has none but its own qualities. It is, you might say, profoundly self-absorbed. It is not even right to say that it lives in solitary confinement, since an inmate in that condition is at least able to reflect on himself and reckon his situation a painful deprivation. The stone has no reflecting pool in itself, no repository for the forms of other things besides itself.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“When I was in high school, I read my first book about ancient Chinese philosophy. I do not remember the title or the author, but one of the proverbs always stuck with me. It went like this:      The uncarved marble is better than the statue.      It is all statues. That got me thinking. “All statues” is better than “one statue”, I had to agree. But the uncarved marble is only potentially all statues. It is actually none. It is not even potentially all, as though it could one day be all statues at once. It is potentially all only insofar as it is able to be carved into one statue and which statue it is to become has not yet been decided.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“There cannot possibly be two things neither of which has a cause of its being. —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“To remain satisfied with atheism, there are many questions one simply mustn’t ask.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“The only way to rest in the intellectual self-satisfaction specifically available to the atheist is to neglect to pursue certain questions to their end and to take care to read only the lowbrow theists, or better still, none at all.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“his atheism was not a reasoned thing; it was a preference. He simply didn’t like the way the world looked to him with a god in the picture. It made the picture ugly to him. He would have nothing to do with it. I am not sure why. No doubt he had encountered many of god’s unpleasantly self-appointed representatives (who hasn’t?) endowed with an exquisite combination of ignorance and arrogance.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“Two first causes would have to share a common nature.      They could thus be distinguished only by some addition to that nature in at least one of them.      That distinguishing addition, since the common nature is indifferent to it, would belong to its possessor through a cause.      Therefore, the possessor of the distinguishing addition would not be a first cause after all. The force of these principles has decided our question for us. There cannot be two or more first causes. There is a single one at most.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“There are some philosophers who would deny this. Some have said none of us has any connection to any reality outside his own head or no certainty of such a connection. But they themselves cannot live in accord with that theory. They theorize in one world and live in another. Nor can they speak in accord with their theory—especially when they presume to be speaking to other people besides themselves, attempting to convince them of their theory.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“world, such as ourselves. It would be strange if the”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“If there were caused causes, with no first cause, they would constitute a middle with nothing before it.      But it is impossible for there to be a middle with nothing before it.      Therefore, there cannot be caused causes with no first cause.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“Materialism, as the story has it, is a sophisticated notion that could not occur to people until after they had taken a hard look at things in the cold light of mathematical physics. Nonsense. In both the East and the West, the most ancient philosophers thought the first cause was some sort of material underlying all things, endowed with certain self-motive properties.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“Theists are, of course, quite capable of being intellectually arrogant asses. But a theist of that variety seems to keep god at a safe distance, locked up in the realm of unreal abstractions, as though he existed for the sole purpose of enabling the theist to be right about something.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“As to why god would put up with atheists who bad-mouth him, I suppose it is because he is not as impatient with them as they are with him.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

“Another source of satisfaction for the atheist that no theist can hope to enjoy is moral autonomy. If we demand our autonomy—if we hold dear the notion that we (as individuals or as a race) are entirely self-determining, that we can become what we please without further consequences than those that follow logically and physically upon our choices, that we should finally be answerable to no one—atheism sits well with that.”
― Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence