“Has anyone provided proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on.”
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
“But of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to the general proscription against gluttony, and once engaged, even if engaged initially in the service of religion, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly, until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself.”
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
“If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.”
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
“Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of the truth? Well, you were wrong.”
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
“What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
― The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
Elnora’s 2025 Year in Books
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