Quotes About Evidence

In fact, what is amazing about this find is that scholars of every stripe—conservative Christians, liberal Christians, believers in Judaism, and secular Jewish scholars—agreed en masse that the special had missed the mark and hadn't come close to making its case.

In order to work, the Jesus tomb hypothesis has to claim that the disciples died for something they knew was a lie—in fact, something they themselves had fabricated. Further, it has to acknowledge that none of the disciples defected, even when faced with suffering and horrible deaths, including stoning and crucifix-ion. Is that likely?

SO WE SEE THAT THERE ARE MORE COMPELLING REASONS TO view the Jesus story as confirmation of the roots of Christianity from its early sources than there is proof of a well-rooted Jesusanity in this earliest period.

between Jesus and history or between Jesus and the witness of his followers within history.

A fifth and more cynical factor is a selective appeal to ancient evidence that highlights features in line with a modern ideological concern at the expense of being fair about the complexity of the ancient evidence.

There is absolutely nothing certain in this world, Noah, other than the truth you see directly in front of your eyes at a given moment. Truth has a habit of mutating itself; it is always possible that, no matter what the evidence in front of you might suggest, there can be another explanation for any event you can imagine.

One of the most interesting things I've discovered about human nature is how willing humans are to disbelieve evidence if it doesn't fit with their own personal beliefs and philosophies. Most people are not truly capable of believing in a doomsday scenario, simply because it's unthinkable to them.

There is absolutely nothing certain in this world, Noah, other than the truth you see directly in front of your eyes at a given moment. Truth has a habit of mutating itself; it is always possible that, no matter what the evidence in front of you might suggest, there can be another explanation for any event you can imagine. All

Alfie had been a private investigator

This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

When assessing family connections, the anatomy of a larva is obviously as valid a piece of evidence as that of an adult. Indeed, it is usually even more significant, for animals have the remarkable tendency to repeat during their individual development the stages through which their ancestors passed during evolutionary history.

Global warming -- at least the modern nightmare vision -- is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.

However accurate or inaccurate the agency's numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.

we are unaware of any convincing evidence that languages are acquired through "practice." On the other hand, studies have shown that students can reach high levels of proficiency through input alone—that is, with little or no production of the language through speech or writing.

The bodies were gone, with no sign that they'd ever been there in the first place.

In summary, the research literature suggests that two forms of outpatient psychotherapy may be effective for anorexia: family therapy based on the Maudsley approach and EOIT as developed by Robin and colleagues. Up to this point, family treatment has received greater attention and has more evidence to support it. However, the tradition of psychodynamic psychotherapy lends additional credibility to EOIT.

We know now that the Earth really does regulate itself, but because of the time it took to gather the evidence we discovered too late that the regulation was failing and the Earth system was fast approaching the critical state that puts all life on it in danger.

In the scientific world, "fear" is usually called "skepticism.

From ibogaine (a plant from West Africa) helping people overcome cocaine and heroin addiction, to MDMA (ecstasy, ADAM, X, and many other names) alleviating the torments and healing the wounds of posttraumatic stress (along with supportive therapy), to psilocybin reducing the anxiety of patients with advanced-stage cancer, there is ample evidence that, wisely administered, these substances lessen the suffering caused by addiction, disease, and mental anguish.

One of the volumes, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and the Global Carbon Cycle," noted that CO2 levels had varied in the last million years with a high point, during warm, interglacial phases, of 350 ppm.21 An enormous amount had been learned; the "Projecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide" alone was over 400 pages long, and is full of hard evidence of how much the federal government knew about the impacts of burning fossil fuels.

FIGURE 5-1. Comb existing sources for relevant evidence, group the implications on the experience people may have, and make conclusions.

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.

If only I had been able to examine the evidence while it was fresh! But no: I had followed my prick instead. What would Sherlock Holmes have said?

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.