Quotes About Explanation

If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable.

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.

Yet the mathematical calculations that would be necessary to explain the principles of vision are just as complex and difficult, and nobody has ever had any difficulty in believing

Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not—it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy

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.

Sugerir que la primera causa, la gran desconocida que es responsable de que exista algo en vez de nada, es un ser capaz de diseñar el universo y de hablar a millones de personas simultáneamente, es una abdicación total de la responsabilidad de encontrar una explicación. Es una espantosa exhibición de confianza en un gancho celestial, llena de autoindulgencia y negación del pensamiento.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice.

Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.

Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life's complex design.

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as "previously owned"; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it.

historians need to treat a participant's own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.

Miss Fergusson had maintained, when they first stood before the haloed mountain, that there were two explanations of everything, that each required the exercise of faith, and that we had been given free will in order that we might choose between them. This dilemma was to preoccupy Miss Logan for years to come. 7

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Die Bücher sagen: Sie hat es getan, weil. Das Leben sagt: Sie hat es getan. In den Büchern werden einem die Dinge erklärt; im Leben nicht. Es überrascht mich nicht, dass manche Leute Bücher vorziehen. Bücher verleihen dem Leben einen Sinn. Das Problem dabei ist nur, dass die Leben, denen sie Sinn verleihen, die Leben anderer Leute sind, niemals das eigene.

religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.

I tried to explain about refusing an unsought gift, about action versus passivity.

I realize you don't understand you shouldn't argue with me, and so I'll explain it to you. Don't argue with me.

It wasn't that people refrained from saying anything out of fear of being laughed at for being unscientific. It was that they felt they'd be drawing unto themselves some unimaginable horror by admitting it. It was more conves indulge in the scientific explanation, no matter how unconvincing it was.

Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to "prove" the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around.

Good God, what happened to ye? Shelton dropped the bucket of water he was carrying, unmindful that it spilled across the barn floor. I fell. Dougal picked up a brush and began to groom Poseidon. Shelton gave a silent whistle. Fell into what? A hammer? Something like that.