Quotes About Evidence

Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

As the columnist Dan Savage says, instead they point "to the suicide rate among gay teenagers—which the religious right works so hard to drive up Ã¢â'¬Â¦ as evidence that the gay lifestyle is destructive. It's like intentionally running someone down with your car and then claiming that it isn't safe to walk the streets.

As the medieval historian Richard Kieckhefer notes, the people of medieval Europe thought of magic as rational for two reasons: "first of all, that it could actually work (that its efficacy was shown by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic) and, secondly, that its workings were governed by principles (of theology or of physics) that could be coherently articulated.

Burden of Proof, or, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Photographs and videos are often misperceived and can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations: aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, helicopters, clouds, swamp gas, or even the planet Venus, which, if you are driving on an undulating highway away from city lights, really does appear to be a bright light following your car.

More evidence against abstinence-only programs may be gleaned from the 2013 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health published in the British Medical Journal and conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1995 and 2009 on more than seventy-eight hundred women; remarkably, it was discovered that 0.5 percent—or one in two hundred—of adolescent girls had reported that they'd become pregnant without sex. Are

I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.

It is no longer acceptable to simply assert your moral beliefs; you have to provide reasons for them, and those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical evidence or else they will likely be ignored or rejected.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

my hope is that whatever it is you decide to believe about whatever subject, you have thought through carefully each of those beliefs and at least tried to make sure that they are your beliefs and not those of your parents. It matters less to me what your specific beliefs are than that you have carefully arrived at your beliefs through reason and evidence and thoughtful reflection.

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non -A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s various researchers contacted Pribram and told him they had uncovered evidence that the visual system worked as a kind of frequency analyzer. Since frequency is a measure of the number of oscillations a wave undergoes per second, this strongly suggested that the brain might be functioning as a hologram does.

As scientists and other logically minded people often point out, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: "My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.

Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce; others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this latter group of men might now be regarded as harassers). That was Trump's approach to women—pleased when he scored, unconcerned when he didn't (and, often, despite the evidence, believing that he had). And so it was with Director Comey.

But evidence is all around you." "The world is all around me. Some parts I understand, some I don't. Some the scientists do, some they don't. It exists. That only proves it exists." "I don't understand how you can look at the world and say there's no God." "And I don't know how you can look at the world and pretend you know there's a God and what he wants. So we're even.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

The puzzle for psychology is how people maintain views of the world that are contrary to the evidence. Why, for example, is the USA both a powerhouse of science and scientific discovery, while at the same time it demonstrates a rapid growth in fundamentalist religious sects that deny or distort the very evidence that science presents?

Detectives always take a suspect to the district surgeon for a physical check-up to prove that he was not assaulted during the arrest.

The detectives asked him why he had had sex with a dead person and he replied that the body had still been warm. This confirmed the fact that people were just objects to him. All serial killers regard their victims as objects.