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Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it. ~ Ch 19

 

Walter M. Miller (Jr.)

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DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald’s phrase, “the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.”

 

Alain Finkielkraut

 

What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole province of our knowledge, however far it may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without danger, the idea that truth is beyond human authority. And we must retain it. For without this idea there can be no objective standards of inquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge.

 

Karl Popper

 

You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature, you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor, in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature, does not weigh against them. But those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped, should not by that sudden stoppage have prostrated animals, trees, buildings, and should after a certain time have resumed its revolution, & that without a second general prostration. Is this arrest of the earth's motion, or the evidence which affirms it, most within the law of probabilities?

 

Thomas Jefferson

 

Science is incapable of supplying answers to ultimate questions about why things exist and what their purpose is.

 

Nicola Cabibbo

 

I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent, unalterable, irremovable authority over them. I don't like the idea of a father who never goes away, the idea of a king who cannot be deposed, the idea of a judge who doesn't allow a lawyer or a jury or an appeal. This is an appeal to absolutism. It's the part of ourselves that's not so nice; that wants security, that wants certainty, that wants to be taken care of. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the human struggle for freedom was against the worst kind of dictatorship of all: the theocracy, the one that claims it has God on its side. I believe that totalitarian temptation has to be resisted. What I'm inviting you to do is to consider emancipating yourselves from the idea that you, selfishly, are the sole object of all the wonders of the cosmos and of nature - because that's not a humble idea at all, it's a very arrogant one and there's no evidence for it. And then, again, the second emancipation - to think of yourselves as free citizens who are not enthralled to any supernatural-eternal authority; which you will always find is interpreted for you by other mammals who claim to have access to this authority - that gives them special power over you. Don't allow yourselves to have your lives run like that.

 

Christopher Hitchens