Quotes About Logic

Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.

Instinct is no match for reason.

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

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.

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.

And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced—too eagerly in my view—that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right.

the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them;

Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.

Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.

A scientific theorum has not been - cannot be - proved in the way a mathematical theorem is proved.

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine.

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done 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.

Careful inference can be more reliable than 'actual observation', however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.

David Hume's pithy test for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind: 'No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

My passion is based on evidence.

That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.

science cannot even make probability judgements on

We can't prove there are no fairies but that doesn't mean we think there's a 50:50 chance fairies exist.

O fato de que bules em órbita e fadinhas do dente não podem ter sua inexistência comprovada não é considerado, por nenhuma pessoa racional, o tipo de fato que solucione um debate interessante. Ninguém se sente obrigado a comprovar a inexistência dos milhões de coisas fantásticas que uma imaginação fértil e brincalhona é capaz de sonhar.

I suspect that he was an exaggeratedly fair-minded atheist, over-eager to be disillusioned if logic seemed to require it.fn3

no philosopher has any trouble using the language of truth when falsely accused of a crime, or when suspecting his wife of adultery. 'Is it true?' feels like a fair question, and few who ask it in their private lives would be satisfied with logic-chopping sophistry in response.