Quotes About Evidence

Some sacred projects are so doggedly committed to advancing their particular, packaged views of believed orthodoxies that they can become blinded to good evidence that problematizes their truth-packages and intolerant of other people whom they believe impede their sacred missions.

My actions should depend on what I know, not what I suspect.

Do you suppose we can take that as evidence? We could cut out the sections. Jonas snorted, You can try taking a saw to that house, but personally, I'm not about to get anywhere near it with anything resembling a weapon.

As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann's various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence. -- The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), page 363.

Dammit, that's not all!" Ripley shouted. She couldn't get through to them. Could they not see? Could they not understand? "' Cause if one of those things gets down here, that will be all, and this…" She grabbed the papers, copies of her deposition, evidence sheets. "This bullshit that you think is so important… you can kiss all that goodbye!

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post- Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.

The elementary rules of logic: that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the "evidence" eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.

But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.

The "evidence" for faith, then, seems to leave faith looking even weaker than it would if it stood, alone and unsupported, all by itself. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the "evidence" eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.

Virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief.

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored.

No one can deny, in face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.

who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis.

Actually, the leap of faith - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a leap that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias.

That is not blind faith but just the opposite: faith continually tested, corrected and provisionally defended by the testimony of our senses and our common sense.

One of Professor Bart Ehrman's more astonishing findings is that the account of Jesus's resurrection in the Gospel of Mark was only added many years later.)

the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact.

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens. It says that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. And how grateful we should be to those of our predecessors who repudiated this utter negation of human freedom.

In fact, surveying the natural order, John Stuart Mill was far nearer the mark when he wrote: If a tenth of the pains taken in finding signs of an all-powerful benevolent god had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the creator's character, what scope would not have been found in the animal kingdom? It is divided into devourers and devoured, most creatures being lavishly fitted with instruments to torment their prey.

If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like.