Quotes from the hard copy, because I can't write in a library book:
Ch. 1, P 19: "Looking squarely at how we have idolized certainty and demonized doubt, I highlight the creative value of doubt, without which real faith is impossible. Instead of insisting on a "theory of everything," I consider the vital role of mystery in a deceptively information-rich world; ask what we mean by the search for meaning; question the assumption that we all necessarily fear death and yearn for the cold realm of immortality...."
Ch. 2, P 28: "As storytellers have always known and psychologists have only recently confirmed, humans are patter-seeking creatures. That is, we seek out narrative. Or rather, we impose it. This is the dynamic behind the stories we tell of ourselves, editing and curation them so that they 'make sense.' We search for a through thread: a linear narrative instead of a series of more or less random occasions where, consciously or not, we went this way instead of that. We discover intention, or perhaps invent it. Thus the unnerving ease of the 'elevator resume,' ... or the popularity of memoirs in which messy realities have been edited out. We create meaning, and in so doing, obey the narrative need for a protagonist."
Ch. 3, P 57: "Reality may require acceptance, but it does not require belief."
Ch. 3, P 59: "The more firmly I hold a belief (and note that word *hold*, that sense of possession, of its being *mine*), the more liable it is to fossilize into conviction, as tightly constricted as...a convict in his cell. And when my belief is so adamantly held that it becomes central to my identity, your disbelief then undermines not only the assumed truth of what I believe, but *me.*"
Ch. 3, P 61; "Muhammad did not float down that mountain: he fled down it, trembling not with joy but in fear for his sanity. And if this reaction strikes us now as unexpected, even shockingly so, that is only a reflection of how badly we have been misled into demonizing doubt and idolizing belief."
Ch. 3, P 67: "What's really being betrayed here, however, is faith itself. To conflate faith with belief is to eviscerate faith, even though the two have been used as virtual synonyms for centuries."
Ch. 3, P 76: "The statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but of what is known to different degrees of certainty. Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity and absolute truth."
Ch. 5, P 127: "The absence of an 'ultimate' meaning of life - a grand, over-arching explanation of everything - does not render life empty of relevance. On the contrary, it makes it all the more relevant. It means we can no longer use divine intent as an excuse...It places responsibility directly on us - responsibility for how we act, for what we do, for our relations with others, with our society, with our planet. It is we who determine meaning by what we do. And part of that meaning is the awareness that we are not and cannot always be in control, that we are indeed subject to chance, to serendipity, to the unforeseen, the unanticipated, the fortuitous."
Ch. 6, P 144: "Doctors now have the ability to prolong life, or more precisely, to delay death. But when they act on it, many experience a kind of medical future shock, realizing with dismay that what they have really prolonged is suffering."
Ch. 6, P 156: "We need endings. To live forever is the stuff of nightmares....The ability to die is an integral part of what makes us human."
Ch. 7, P 164: "One of the great conundrums of human consciousness is that we can conceive of things that, strictly speaking, we can't conceive of. We conceive, that is, of the inconceivable, and this is what makes infinity so ineffably daunting. Infinity is the view from nowhere. It challenges not only what we think of as common sense, but also our whole concept of the world. (snip) And since it is immeasurably larger and grander than the anthropomorphic divinity of biblical renown, infinity may in fact be closer to how most people really think of God than anything theology has yet conceived of."
Ch. 7, P 169: "This is what infinity does. It teems with paradox and conundrum. It soars beyond conventional ideas of rational and irrational, leaving you either gaping in awe or laughing helplessly at everything you thought you knew."
Ch. 8, P 193: "...It's important to reclaim soul from those who still conceive of it as a thing with an immortal life of its own, independent of the body. However vague we may be about it, I think most of us recognize soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma, going far beyond traditional religious ideas such as those I grew up with."
Ch. 8, P 202: "You wall yourself off when you expect the worst. Better the devil you know, you tell yourself, than the unpredictability of the unknown; better to be ruled by the past than by hope for a different future."