Quotes About Explanation

Luck often is a lazy man's explanation for the result of intelligent diligence.

Sin we have explain'd away; Unluckily, the sinners stay.

THE STOICS COULD HAVE given us a philosophy of life without explaining why it is a good philosophy. They could, in other words, have left adoption of their philosophy of life as a leap of faith, the way Zen Buddhists do with theirs. But being philosophers, they felt the need to prove that theirs was the "correct" philosophy of life and that rival philosophies were somehow mistaken.

Ultimately, that's what evil is . . . it's something bad without an explanation. Which is why it's terrifying. And as for mercy in the dark – well, what is salvation if not a light greater than all the shadows, something good which cannot be explained? It, too, can be terrifying. I doubt if men like Otto Brack, would dare look in its direction.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?

Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature - unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMATION Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. The universe exists. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

Naturalism Naturalism is the belief that only natural explanations (as opposed to supernatural ones) should be considered. Because a designer is defined as supernatural—beyond nature—naturalism rules out this explanation, regardless of evidence.

Well, then, what explanation of the empty tomb do modern critics offer who deny the resurrection?" The fact is that they are self-confessedly without any explanation to offer.

Adopting the multiverse hypothesis to explain our ordered observations would thus result once more in a strange sort of illusionism.

Conclusion Therefore it seems to me that of the three alternatives before us—physical necessity, chance, or design—the most plausible explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe is design. That gives us a transcendent, super-intelligent Designer of the cosmos who has fixed the values of nature's laws. Incredible! So now we have a third argument contributing to a cumulative case for the existence of God.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMATION Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. The universe exists. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God. Logically speaking, this is

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.

A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

Now, why is it that the idea of intention keeps turning up in explanations of adaptation, intruding even into ones where it is supposed to have no place? And why is it as hard, as we saw in the preceding section that it is, to translate the idea of intention out of the explanation of any particular adaptation? "Surely

If "final causes" means purposes, or purposive activities, then Darwinism not only does not "expel" them: it builds them into the very foundation of its explanation of evolution. Even

Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt.

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This

If modernity is, as I will argue, a global phenomenon, a Eurocentric approach is bound to mislead us. More recently, historians interested in world history have tried to see modernity as a global problem that requires a global explanation.

He said all I could do was tell them, so that is what I did, I told them all the long the short and the tall

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever