Quotes About Knowledge

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

Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think.

There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.

One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don't know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don't know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.

The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried

Scientific truths are true even if there's nobody around to know about them; were true before humans appeared; will be true after we are extinct.

We needn't bother with exactly what 'electric charge' means here.

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism.

As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

the God of the Gaps' strategy condemned by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 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. What worries scientists is something else.

labelling our ignorance God.

Uno de los verdaderamente nefastos efectos de la religión es que nos inculca como virtud el estar satisfechos con el desconocimiento.

uno de los efectos auténticamente perniciosos de la religión es que enseña que estar satisfecho con el desconocimiento es una virtud.

There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them.

My passion is based on evidence.

Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away.

I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.).

To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'we don't understand it' but to say ' we will never understand it, so don't even try.

giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.

If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.