Quotes About Understanding

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use. The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.

It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies.

one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!

Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.

Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained.

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them.

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them;

A] proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately - usurped.

If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.