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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 12ca774 | I am not postulating a "God of the gaps", a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.' Richard Swinburne" | John C. Lennox | ||
| 780c30c | The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penros.. | physics theory-of-general-relativity universe | Stephen Hawking | |
| 4c0dd36 | I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate... We are truly meant to be here. | John C. Lennox | ||
| cd28c76 | When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, 'I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.' Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 32430c8 | The heart of monotheism is that God, who is outside history, is the guarantor of meaning. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 700fa9f | The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator God, who designed the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 945683c | Here we have the basic ingredients that define human beings as moral beings. God has given them the ability to say "yes" to him by not eating the prohibited tree, and to say "no" to him by eating it. In this way the Bible introduces us to the idea that the humans are moral beings, with all that this implies." | John C. Lennox | ||
| 262da13 | Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: 'The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics. | John C. Lennox | ||
| e8ad691 | We are a product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. | John C. Lennox | ||
| b1ba6bd | The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 8b69dbe | Just because a religion has supported science does not prove that the religion is true. Quite so - and the same can, of course, be said of atheism. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 2eb8b96 | Far from science abolishing God, it would seem that there is a substantial case for asserting that it is the existence of a Creator that gives to science its fundamental intellectual justification. | John C. Lennox | ||
| 4ce7456 | The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.' Swinburne is using inference to the best explanation and saying that God is the best explanation for the explanatory power of science. | John C. Lennox | ||
| a993430 | The victim's submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 49485fa | The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil)," observes Ayn Rand, "except a share of its failures and crimes. . . ."17" | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| b12e45b | We don't see things in themselves, but only aspects of things. | Timothy Ferris | ||
| e21418e | Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly (except when, inexplicably, it resists). First, action--second, thought--third, reality. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 30420da | The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 8a56c23 | Ayn Rand defines "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep."3 "Value" denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity's action is directed to acquiring or preserving" | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 05f01dc | The Germans, therefore, practiced them. In order not to be eaten alive by the next round of legislation, virtually everyone joined or identified himself with a group (since an isolated individual had no chance against large, vocal blocs). And every group knew only one policy: to demand new economic benefits from the government and/or new legislative sanctions against the other groups. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 37a80f6 | The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, "is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life...." The goal is to foster the child's "social capacity"--by, among other things, "saturating him with the spirit of service...."21" | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 2ed7f2f | In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| d5c182c | The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| cd81c9e | The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 095520d | Racial subjectivism holds that a man's inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions--and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 6e40e90 | Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil is consistent in only one regard: its essence is consistently at war with all the values and virtues human life requires. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 066e523 | A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| ba3e8f6 | has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals... | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 55bc035 | This is the actual answer to Auschwitz. We are told insistently to remember the Holocaust. Eloquent, horrifying books describe the facts to us in every detail. The truth about a monstrous, historic evil virtually screams out from hundreds of thousands of pages. But few, including the authors, seem to hear the scream. The commentators do not say that the camps are the final, perfect embodiment of all the fundamental ideas which made Hitler p.. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 93dedf5 | An interest," writes Kant, "is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest." | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 692627a | I say close down the schools of education. At most, all that is required is a one-year post-high school course on practical advice: tips on motivating; | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| f9c6aec | Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no course of behavior can be more dangerous. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| b1b331b | The authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited," said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933." -- | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 2b5a93e | Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are nonmaterial entities in another dimension, independent of man's mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume--the concretes that make up this world--are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality. Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were la.. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 84864d3 | These hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope more than anything, for more. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 5f8d561 | He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 6100c6c | Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 6e238ef | Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 333745b | It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| bf56b16 | He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 25e3703 | This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but describable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 34936de | Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be l.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 43237c1 | Morning, Peter," she calls from the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning, Pedder. She's been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one hand disdains her country of origin (Darling, the word "lugubrious" comes to mind) but on the other seems to grow more German (more not-American) with every pas.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7402c7a | There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other. | Michael Cunningham |