Doubt is our true ally, it encourages us to think rationally and move forward.

Doubt is our true ally, it encourages us to think rationally and move forward.

Belief on the other hand can be an enemy continually preying on our emotions.

Doubt is our true ally, it encourages us to think rationally and move forward.

Belief on the other hand can be an enemy continually preying on our emotions.

Belief tends to persuade us to discount evidence that is unsettling to our convictions and locks one forever in a false sense of security.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away

Philip K Dick

The Relativity of WrongWhen people thought the Earth was flat they were wrong. When people thought it was round they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is round is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat then your view is more wrong than both of them put together

Isaac Asimov - 1989

Real progress in the development of humanity – a truly human, and our greatest, creation - has only been possible because legions of brave men and women have, throughout history, fought to break the grip on society of those who claim power based on unproven and unprovable dogma.

Let us consider a the following events

200,000 people died in the South East Asia Tsunami

6-7 million people died in Germany at the hands of the Nazis

Countless Indians died as the Europeans colonised in North and South America

100,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagaski

4000 died in the WTC on 11th Sept 2001

Would one charcaterise any or all these events ere any of these as evil?

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able to prevent it? Then God is not omnipotent

Is God able to prevent evil but not willing to prevent it? Then God is malevolent

Is God both able to prevent evil and willing to to prevent it? - Then whence comes evil?

Epicurus

Probably nothing - about science - disturbs non-scientists more than the seemingly dogmatic rejection of claims of the paranormal.

But science is not rejecting the claims so much as the evidence used to support them

Alan Comer

Probably nothing - about science - disturbs non-scientists more than the seemingly dogmatic rejection of claims of the paranormal.

But science is not rejecting the claims so much as the evidence used to support them

Alan Comer

What a more critical mind might recognise as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality

Carl Sagan

The Demon Haunted World

Man (and Woman) is a credulous animal and must believe something – in the absence of good grounds for belief, he (and she) will be satisfied with bad ones.

Bertrand Russell

Hume’s Maxim

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle (or anything extraordinary), unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous (or extraordinary) than that which it endeavours to establish.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1758

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka I found it!”, but “That’s funny…”

Isaac Asimov

This seems simple to us today but was pretty daring at the time

Lester Little

American Academy Rome

By Science

I mean knowledge pure and simple with no limits

and thus I mean an understanding of everything

In this sense Science is truly independent of race, colour or creed and thus the only international, humanitarian and democratic philosophy

Scientific advances are only fully accepted when the recipe is published so that the experiments can be repeated and the results unequivocally confirmed.

Scientific advances are only fully accepted when the recipe is published so that the experiments can be repeated and the results unequivocally confirmed.

A lie will travel half way round the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.

Mark Twain

The most common of follies is the belief passionately in the palpably untrue

H L Mencken

Even if a billion people believe a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing

Anatole France (x20)

The Royal Society chose:

“Nullius in verba”

“We take nobody’s word for it“

Intellectual Integrity

Intellectual integrity - the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence,

or

leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive

Bertrand Russell 1957