Quotes About Philosophy

Why didn't God make the world sooner? In the early fifth century AD, Augustine of Hippo answered that God did not make the universe at a point in time, but "simultaneously with time." That is, he believed God had created space and time together. Modern cosmologists have come to agree that he was right about space and time, and therefore it is meaningless to ask why the big bang didn't happen earlier than it did.

Christianity entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering.

Reductio ad absurdum, or reduction to absurdity, is a form of argument that proves a statement by demonstrating that its opposite is absurd.

The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1]

Leibniz's reasoning: 1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. 3. The universe exists.

Two statements are logically equivalent if it is impossible for one to be true and the other false. They are either both true or both false. One of the most important logical equivalences is called contraposition. It tells us that any statement of the form "If P, then Q" is logically equivalent to "If not-Q, then not-P." The example in the text of statements A and B is an example of contraposition.

Conclusion On the basis, therefore, of both philosophical and scientific evidence, we have good grounds for believing that the universe began to exist. Since whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning, it follows that the universe has a cause of its beginning.

We talked about this before. The rare beauty of nonattachment.

The greatest spirits of the heathen world, such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Antonius, etc., owed all their greatness to the spirit of devotion.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

All is vanity, look you; and so the preacher is vanity too.

William Makepeace Thackeray

They never get ahead an inch, because they are always hugging some coward maxim, which they can only interpret literally.... Of what use is it "to be sawing about a set of maxims to which there is a complete set of antagonist maxims"? Proverbs, it has been well said, should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half-truth.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

Gin and catatonic?

If we piled them up, they would reach God.' 'But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.' 'Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.' " "Old one." "Jokes only get old if they're good. Otherwise, who keeps telling them?" "People like you who aren't funny?

The rational alternative to Darwin's theory is intelligent uncertainty.

There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience

The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about is of course firmly embedded in our entire tradition.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.

All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan poet once told me.

where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The "How do I succeed?" questions quickly eclipse the "Why am I doing this?" questions.