The Courage to think independently -- and ignore one's peers!
After serving two years in prison, the father of modern experimental science began work on his final publication: a scathing criticism of Christianity's corruptness.
Friends Who Can Not be Lost...
Dogma? (Only for the birds...)
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (for which the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958)
The Immigrant Experience: "If one works assiduously and lies low long enough, even underdogs will have their day."
"Give a man a gold coin, and he will spend it and ask for more."
ABC 20/20's Hugh Downs on America's Drug War.
"Larry kept saying things that a lot of people really thought, but would never openly say." (Now he's wanted: Dead!)
Some relevant quotes...
Strictly speaking, you only know when you know little.
Doubt grows with knowledge.
--Goethe
The more he became truly wise,
the more he distrusted everything he knew.
--Voltaire (describing a theologian)
To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is
to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them to not see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.
--Galileo
Galilei (The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies)
The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have
seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the
church.
--Ferdinand Magellan
Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will
believe whatever the Church teaches.
--St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica)
Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the
power.
--Joseph McCabe (What Gods Cost Men)
We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is
really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.
--St. Ignatius of Loyola (Exercitia spiritualia)
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an
agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that
is all Agnosticism means.
--Clarence Darrow (Scopes Trial)
I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into
the public schools of the United States.
--Thomas Alva Edison (Do We Live Again?)
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night
a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a
man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind,
old men as guides.
--Heinrich Heine (Gedanken und Einfalle)
Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy
has ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state... but they
still have control of that of our children. This means that children have
to learn about Adam and Noah instead of Evolution; about David who killed
Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into
heaven instead of the Wrights'. Worse than that, children are taught that
it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves
them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very
difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in
science.
--J. B. S. Haldane
Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold,
and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for
our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be
cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman,
simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read
and to believe?
--Thomas Jefferson (letter to Dufief)
The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions,
has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and
stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you
are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for
it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall
persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay
My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation
and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger
with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change
them.
--Abraham Lincoln (to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after his son Willie
Lincoln died)
I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not
teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized,
on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of his fate and
captain of his soul. To attain this I would put priests to work and turn
their temples into schools.
--Jawaharlal Nehru
No school...in which any religious sectarian doctrine shall be
taught...shall receive any portion of the school monies.
--New York State Bill (passed by the legislature, April 11, 1842)
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall
govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule
it by fictitious miracles?
--John Adams (letter to Thomas Jefferson)
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.
--Blaise Pascal
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
--Thomas Paine
Bertrand Russell...
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occured to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue
can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the
truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I
believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that
virtues based upon lies can only do harm.
(From The Prospects of Industrial Civilization [London: Allen & Unwin,
1923], p. 252; written in collaboration with Dora Russell)
On Astrologers (1932)
In schools and universities information of all sorts is ladled out, but no
one is taught to reason, or to consider what is evidence for what. To any
person with even the vaguest idea of the nature of scientific evidence,
such beliefs as those of astrologers are of course impossible. But so are
most of the beliefs upon which governments are based, such as the peculiar
merit of persons living in a certain area, or of persons whose income
exceeds a certain sum. It would not do to teach people to reason correctly,
since the result would be to undermine these beliefs. If these beliefs were
to fade, mankind might escape disaster, but politicians could not. At all
costs, therefore, we must be kept stupid.
How to Become a Man of Genius (1932)
A man of genius knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are
pontifical and depend for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather
than argument. It is necessary to be one-sided, since this facilitates the
vehemence that is considered a proof of strength. It is essential to appeal
to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to
do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the
slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach
conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the
very latest thing.
Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? (1947)
The question of how to define Rationalism is not altogether an easy one. I
do not think that you could define it by rejection of this or that
Christian dogma. It would be perfectly possible to be a complete and
absolute Rationalist in the true sense of the term and yet accept this or
that dogma.
The question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are. The thing in which we believe is the supremacy of reason. If reason should lead you to orthodox conclusions, well and good; you are still a Rationalist.
To my mind the essential thing is that one should base one's arguments upon the kind of grounds that are accepted in science, and one should not regard anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable to a greater or lesser degree. Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
What Is an Agnostic? (1953)
No. An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not
there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God;
the atheist, that we can know there is not. The agnostic suspends
judgement, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for
affirmation or for denial.
At the same time, an agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may hold it is so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have toward the gods of ancient Greece.
If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An agnostic may think the Christian God is as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.
Is not faith in reason alone a dangerous creed? Is not reason imperfect
and inadequate without spiritual and moral law?
No sensible man, however agnostic, has "faith in reason alone". Reason
is concerned with matters of fact, some observed, some inferred. The
question whether there is a future life and the question whether there is a
God concerns some matters of fact, and the agnostic holds that they should
be investigated in the same way as the question, "Will there be an eclipse
of the moon tomorrow?"
But matters of fact alone are not sufficient to determine action, since they do not tell us what ends we ought to pursue. In the realm of ends, we need something other than reason. The agnostic will find his ends in his own heart and not in an external command.
Let us take an illustration: Suppose you wish to travel by train from New York to Chicago; you will use reason to discover when the trains run, and a person who thought that there was some faculty of insight or intuition telling him to dispense with the timetable would be thought rather silly.
But no timetable will tell him that it is wise to go to Chicago. No doubt, in deciding that it is wise, he will have to take account of further matters of fact; but behind all matters of fact, there will be the ends that he thinks fitting to pursue, and these, for an agnostic as for other men, belong to a realm which is not that of reason, though it should be in no degree contrary to it. The realm I mean is that of emotion and feeling and desire.
Communism, like agnosticism, opposes religion. Are agnostics communists?
Communism does not oppose religion. It merely opposes the Christian
religion, just as Mohammedanism does. Communism, at least in the form
advocated by the Soviet government and the Communist party, is a new
system of dogma of a peculiarly virulent and persecuting sort. Every genuine agnostic must therefore be opposed to it.
Do agnostics think that science and religion are impossible to reconcile?
The answer turns upon what is meant by "religion". If it means merely a
system of ethics, it can be reconciled with science. If it means a system
of dogma, regarded as unquestionably true, it is incompatible with the
scientific spirit, which refuses to accept matters of fact without
evidence, and also holds that complete certainty is hardly ever
attainable.
This web page is dedicated to all those who have discussed, debated, and
helped refine my beliefs. Especially to those great thinkers, past and
present, who refused to be cowed by the prevailing social prejudices of
their time. Many thanks too, to Ateneo de Manila University, Philippine
Science High School, the University of the Philippines, the National
Computer Institute, the
Ayn Rand Institute, the
Skeptics Society,
Caltech, and the
Council for Secular Humanism.
© 1998 by an
Agnostic Pinoy
on the web
[
No False Gods: For individual liberty and
against tyranny! ]
[ Money! (Accumulating wealth may be simpler than you think...) ]
