Midterm Quotes Flashcards
_____ of US scientists believe in life after death & that God answers prayers
40%
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, ________ blind, pitiless indifference.”
nothing but
“The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the _____________.”
apparent design
“I have never been an ________in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”
atheist
______ of Canadians & Americans are teleologists
90%
______ of Canadians & Americans are anti-evolutionists
50%
“The intention is to _______, rather than to pass judgement, on the phenomena of religion.”
describe
“Evolution is the _________ of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we [ultimately] are.”
creation-myth
“We [my capitals] as religious people asking spiritual questions have tried to see ________our senses. Is it just imagination or is it a holy power that impels us?”
beyond
“The traditional conception of philosophy, which was dominant throughout the history of Western thought, was that philosophy can investigate the content of our beliefs, including the _________________of theological beliefs.”
truth or falsity
“Logic requires that religious trust can be either [1] well placed or [2] misplaced as can nonreligious trust, since beliefs about the divine are–-as all other beliefs–- either ____________ but not both at once. It follows, therefore, that when two beliefs disagree about what is divine, one or both of them must be (at least partly) false.”
True or False
“A religious belief is any belief in something or other as divine. ‘Divine’ means having the status of not depending on anything else. . . . All [religions] believe that the divine is whatever is ‘__________.’”
just there
“[Idealistic] Pantheistic traditions insist that what is wrong with people is their attachment to the illusory world as it is encountered in ordinary experience by reason … ______________, they say, fails to recognize that logical thinking is also part of the everyday world of illusion. As such, logical thinking is part of the deception that prevents people from discovering the divine unity of all reality.”
Logical Criticism
“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both ______and Money.”
God
“If such non-literal, non-chronological usage seems strange to us that is __________ and our challenge to understand. The text (bible) is after all, our teacher.
our problem
“Oral tradition … serves as the principle repository for the collective experience and general beliefs, attitudes, and values of the community … The primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community, supplying the community with a continuously evolving ‘____________’ …
social charter
“Neither a philosophy of the ‘____________’ nor a philosophy of the ‘___________’ will do for our time. Only an approach that is resolutely guided by the question ‘What is what?’ will avoid reading mysteries into the facts, as well as refrain from impoverishing them by reduction to something less than experience attests them to be.”
Something More
Nothing But
“The world which Science presents for our belief: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end [teleology] they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are [nothing] but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; . . . all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system . . . all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so ____________, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
nearly certain
“Philosophers long made a mummy of science. When they finally unwrapped the cadaver and saw the remnants of an historical process of becoming and discovering, they created for themselves a _______________. That happened around _______.”
Crisis of rationality
1950
“Conflation … simply means the collapsing of distinct items in such a way that their differences are apparently lost … [Conflation blends] science and ________into an undifferentiated smudge … a careless commingling of science with ________ … a tangled muddle.”
Belief
Belief
“_______________________, scientific skeptics have uncritically fused [conflated] the scientific method with scientism, a belief system that assumes, without any scientific demonstration, that science is the only appropriate way to look at things.”
Without usually being aware of it
“__________________________, theologians always bring at least implicit cosmological assumptions to their talk about God, and it is only honest that they acknowledge this fact.”
Whether they are aware of it or not
“I think philosophically that one should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely, that … evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain _________________________, which at some level cannot be proven empirically. I guess we all knew that, but I think that we’re all much more sensitive to these facts now. Well, I’ve been very short, but that was my message, and I think it’s an important one.”
a priori or metaphysical assumptions
“The first major challenge to religion in an age of science is the ___________of the
methods of science.”
success
