Quotes About Rationality

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

I don't think faith is positive, because faith means belief without evidence, and you shouldn't believe anything without evidence. [The Daily Show 24 Sept 2013]

most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.

And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced—too eagerly in my view—that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right.

the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.

its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive him-self'.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

But religious faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation, which usually seems to trump all others. This is mostly, I suspect, because of the easy and beguiling promise that death is not the end, and that a martyr's heaven is especially glorious. But it is also partly because it discourages questioning, by its very nature.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them religious; otherwise, they are likely to be called mad, psychotic or delusional... Clearly there is sanity in numbers.

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.

We can't prove there are no fairies but that doesn't mean we think there's a 50:50 chance fairies exist.

Sterelny challenges us to explain 'how we can be simultaneously so smart and so dumb'.75

O fato de que bules em órbita e fadinhas do dente não podem ter sua inexistência comprovada não é considerado, por nenhuma pessoa racional, o tipo de fato que solucione um debate interessante. Ninguém se sente obrigado a comprovar a inexistência dos milhões de coisas fantásticas que uma imaginação fértil e brincalhona é capaz de sonhar.

Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.'84 Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. … I care about what's true.

Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens

The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

The core premise of economic theory is that people choose by optimizing.

We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that makes our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment. MERLE SHAIN

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.

he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.