We have all heard the forlorn refrain Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time! This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appr...
Does require anyone who makes the trip to abandon some precious intuitions, but I think that I have at last found ways of making the act of jettisoning these obvious truths not just bearable but even...
If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surfa...
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory,...
It’s just that it would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stori...
Some philosophical research projects — or problematics, to speak with the more literary types — are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed-upon rules are presupposed — a...
There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was p...
Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having m...
Atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred
Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.
But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn’t trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.
But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots—or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecula...
Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talen...
Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion. —Steven Weinberg, 1999
I didn’t plan to become an atheist. I didn’t even want to become an atheist. It’s just that I had no choice. If I’m being honest with myself.
It is not scientism to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in’ France and the Holocaust actually happened....
It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s not an academic pursuit—it sort of masquerades as one, but at its core it’s a test of trust in each other. Are you or aren’t you one of us? And woe to the one w...
No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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