The host of the DNews show wearing a “never trust an atom” shirt during a 2013 episode (Ѻ) entitled “Does Believing in God Make You Dumb?”. |
“Who can be trusted to tell me whether my technical terms are all wrong?”— Henry Adams (1908), complaint to his brother Brooks Adams, after months of searching for a physicochemical proof-reader [see: Henry Bumstead] for his social phase theory of history [2]
In 2015, Libb Thims ordered "Keep Clam and Trust God" joke T-shirts for god-believers, as a bit of humor, to wear on the Atheism Reviews show. |
“We must trust nothing but facts: these are present to us by nature, and cannot deceive.”— Antoine Lavoisier (1789), Elements of Chemistry (pg. xviii)
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in god, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in god.”— C.S. Lewis (c.1950), an argument for the existence of god (Ѻ); supposedly has something to do with Lewis’ earlier “argument from reason”, defended in his 1947 Miracles: a Preliminary Study, wherein he cited John Haldane’s 1927 quote: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” [4]
“Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky, but Crom is your god. Crom, and he lives in the earth. Once giants lived in the earth, Conan, and in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered, and the earth shook, and fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters. But in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield, and we who found it. We are just men, not gods, not giants, just men. And the secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan, you must learn its discipline, for no one, no one in this world can you trust, not men, not women, not beasts... This you can trust. [points to his sword].”— Robert Howard (1982), Conan the Barbarian; explaining the mystery of steel to Conan; written by John Milius and Oliver Stone, based on the character Conan created by Robert Howard (Ѻ); thematic to Friedrich Nietzsche and Scarface (1983) dialogue
“Whether it was the worldwide flood, the feeding of the 5,000, or arguing against the possibility that man evolved from molecules to ape to man over millions of years, dad defended the word of God as if his life depended upon it … which, in fact, it did. He was always adamant about one thing: if you can’t trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can’t trust the rest of the Bible.”— Ken Ham (2006), Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World [3]
“Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?”References— Anon (c.2008), AtheistBlogger.com list of 101 atheist quotes (Ѻ); found via mAtheist app (Ѻ)“Never trust the work of a Templeton Prize winner or associate.”— Libb Thims (2013), mental note arisen in reflection of recent adds to Paul Davies page; along with past thought on other Templeton-funded writers: Robert Ulanowicz, Terrence Deacon (Ѻ), among others, whose mind[s] has gone to pasture, i.e. left the path of truth for sake of spiritual/God theory justification aiming/biased funding, 10:09 AM CST, Dec 9.
Further reading