Quotes About Evidence

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.

Jesus supposedly lived sometime between 4 B.C.E. and 30 C.E., but there is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, not during his entire lifetime.

leaders should be wary of common sense, which can be a poor substitute for evidence.)

This is where Bayes' Theorem comes in and helps us have a clearer picture. By using the theorem, we are forced to look at all data and update our hypothesis with new evidence.

Now, remember what Bayes' Theorem does: it helps us update a hypothesis based on new evidence.

Bayes' Theorem does: it helps us update a hypothesis based on new evidence.

The legendary New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

traditionalists have already equivocated on fundamental definitions of key terms like translation and revelation. Clearly, there are other ways to construe the evidence, even for traditionalists.

We have arrived at one of the central paradoxes of economics: uniformity amid diversity. Economists work with a plethora of models, pointing in all kinds of contradictory directions. Yet when it comes to the issues of the day, their views often converge in ways that cannot be justified by the strength of the available evidence.

in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon.

Unfortunately, even big ideas leave no fossils for carbon dating

The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later.

Mais, c'est évident !".

I don't care where you think your resources are going. If you know, show me the measurements. If you don't, stop wasting my time.

Critical thinking doesn't mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.

Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. Once

when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

We used to speak familiarly of an agent, now do more, who was accustomed to manufacture evidence, and to invent facts in his cases, or at least to alter the aspects of facts to such an extent that they might fairly be viewed as new.

On television and in the movies, crimes are always solved. Nothing is left uncertain. By the end, the viewer knows whodunit. In real life, on the other hand, many murders remain unsolved, and even some that are 'solved' to the satisfaction of the police and prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to result in a conviction.

To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.

Concepts are vindicated by the constant accrual of data and independent verification of data. No prize, not even a Nobel Prize, can make something true that is not true.

If there is evidence that an employee has broken the law, caused harm to veterans, or have violated the public trust, they should be terminated immediately. Instead, due to overly cumbersome and lengthy arbitrations as well as extensive bureaucratic red tape, VA has not been able to remove employees as quickly as we would have liked.