“I had no need of that hypothesis.”
—Pierre-Simon Laplace
“Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.”
—H. L. Mencken
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
“ATHEISM: The arrogant belief that the entire billion-galaxy universe was not created for us.”
—unknown
“Atheists: Disbelieving in gods without getting struck by lightning for more than 2000 years.”
—James F. McGrath
“Atheism grows in proportion to the growth of knowledge and freedom. No law of history is more consistently revealed in the records.”
—Joseph McCabe, “Is The Position Of Atheism Growing Stronger?”
“Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.”
—Maximilien de Robespierre
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
—Epicurus (attributed)
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
—Thomas Jefferson
“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
“The reason I’m an atheist isn’t because of the argument from evil or from unbelief or from inconsistent revelations or anything. No, the reason I’m an atheist is because theism drastically fails Solomonoff induction.
“If I want to pull somebody away from magical thinking, I don’t need to mention atheism. Instead, I teach them Kolmogorov complexity and Bayesian updating. I show them the many ways our minds trick us. I show them the detailed neuroscience of human decision-making. I show them that we can see (in the brain) a behavior being selected up to 10 seconds before a person is consciously aware of ‘making’ that decision. I explain timelessness.
“And if they have time to consume enough math and science, then The God Question just fades away as not even a question worth talking about.
“I don’t have any specialized arguments against fairies like ‘the argument from fairy-unbelief.’ But it’s obvious that the fairy explanation for anything badly fails Solomonoff induction. When you know enough math and cognitive science and physics, The Fairy Question just doesn’t even come up.”
—Luke Muehlhauser, “Why I Don’t Care about Atheism vs. Theism Arguments Anymore”
“[W]hen it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really, really tried. I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up.
“Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.
“No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.
“So rather than be just another mindless religious robot, mindlessly and aimlessly and blindly believing that all of this is in the hands of some spooky incompetent father figure who doesn't give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on.
“And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshipper. Well, not overnight, you can't see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshipper.”
—George Carlin
“Christianity, for all its wounds, is not likely to die; even its forms will not die; the forms, indeed, will preserve what remains of the substance. Of all religions devised by man, it is the one that offers the most for the least money to the average man of our time. This man may be very briefly described. He has enough education to make him view all religions somewhat critically, to make him competent to weigh and estimate them, particularly in terms of their capacity to meet his own problems—but not enough to analyze the concepts underlying them. Such an analysis leads inevitably to agnosticism; a man who once reaches the point of examining religions as psychological phenomena, without regard to their ostensible authority, always ends by rejecting all of them. But the average man is incapable of any such examination, and his incapacity not only safeguards his religion but also emphasizes his need of it. He must have some answer to the maddening riddle of existence, and, being unable to work out a logical or evidential answer, he is thrown back upon a mystical answer.
“This mystical answer is religion. It is a transcendental solace in the presence of the intolerable. It is a stupendous begging of questions that nevertheless disposes of them. Of all such answers Christianity is at once the simplest and the most reassuring. It is protean and elastic; it has infinite varieties; it has comfort both for the man revolting despairingly against reason or congenitally incapable of reason, and for the man whose capacity for reason stops just short of intelligence. It is, at its best, a profound inner experience, a kind of poetry that is lived—call it Catholicism. It is, at its worst, a game of supernatural politics—call it Methodism. But in either case it organizes and gives a meaning to life. In either case it soothes the man who is too weak to stand up single-handed against the eternal and intolerable mysteries.”
—H. L. Mencken
“Faith gives man a peculiar sense of his own dignity and importance. The believer finds himself distinguished above other men, exalted above the natural man; he knows himself to be a person of distinction, in the possession of peculiar privileges; believers are aristocrats, unbelievers plebeians. God is this distinction and pre-eminence of believers above unbelievers, personified. Because faith represents man’s own nature as that of another being, the believer does not contemplate his dignity immediately in himself, but in this supposed distinct person. The consciousness of his own pre-eminence presents itself as a consciousness of this person; he has the sense of his own dignity in this divine personality. As the servant feels himself honoured in the dignity of his master, nay, fancies himself greater than a free, independent man of lower rank than his master, so it is with the believer. He denies all merit in himself, merely that he may leave all merit to his Lord, because his own desire of honour is satisfied in the honour of his Lord. Faith is arrogant, but it is distinguished from natural arrogance in this, that it clothes its feeling of superiority, its pride, in the idea of another person, for whom the believer is an object of peculiar favour. This distinct person, however, is simply his own hidden self, his personified, contented desire of happiness: for he has no other qualities than these, that he is the benefactor, the Redeemer, the Saviour,—qualities in which the believer has reference only to himself, to his own eternal salvation. In fact, we have here the characteristic principle of religion, that it changes that which is naturally active into the passive. The heathen elevates himself, the Christian feels himself elevated. The Christian converts into a matter of feeling, of receptivity, what to the heathen is a matter of spontaneity. The humility of the believer is an inverted arrogance,—an arrogance none the less because it has not the appearance, the external characteristics of arrogance. He feels himself pre-eminent: this pre-eminence, however, is not a result of his activity, but a matter of grace; he has been made pre-eminent; he can do nothing towards it himself. He does not make himself the end of his own activity, but the end, the object of God.”
—Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity