Wise Skeptical Quotes

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

Believing or not makes no difference to the Absolute of Things That Be. But it does to you. For you shall live and die accordingly. A wise person, or a fool. Choose.

While it is wise to think globally, all organisms are affected locally!

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

[I]f the public wants the military to perform better, give more prudent advice to its civilian leadership, and spend taxpayer money more wisely, it must elect a Congress that will dial down a few notches its habitual and childish 'we support the troops!' mantra and start asking skeptical questions - and not accepting bland evasions or appeals to patriotism as a response.

If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.

A person who peremptorily denies the existence of anything which is beyond the horizon of his understanding because he cannot make it harmonise with his accepted opinions is as credulous as he who believes everything without any discrimination. Either of these persons is not a freethinker, but a slave to the opinions which he has accepted from others, or which he may have formed in the course of his education, and by his special experiences in his (naturally limited) intercourse with the world. If such persons meet with any extraordinary fact that is beyond their own experience, they often either regard it with awe and wonder, and are ready to accept any wild and improbable theory that may be offered to them in regard to such facts, or they sometimes reject the testimony of credible witnesses, and frequently even that of their own senses. They often do not hesitate to impute the basest motives and the most silly puerilities to honourable persons, and are credulous enough to believe that serious and wise people had taken the trouble to play upon them “practical jokes,” and they are often willing to admit the most absurd theories rather than to use their own common sense.

Be skeptic, be doubtful, be rebellious towards every single dogma of the society. Only then there will be hope of progress for humanity.

If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do muchwhat as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.

To adore, or scorne an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleepe, or runne wrong, is: on a huge hill, Cragg'd, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must, and about must goe; And what the hills suddenes resists, winne so; Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight, Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night.

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is, I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.

I’m consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It’s

The wise take the business of laughing at themselves seriously. They hedge their pronouncements and are skeptical in their conclusions. Their certainties are not as brittle as those of others. They laugh from the constant collisions between the noble way they’d like things to be and the demented way they in fact often turn out.

Scientists who grapple with biological origins are still affected by Platonic idealism today; Charles Lyell’s nineteenth-century geological theories still influence our understanding of human evolution; quantum theory is still wrestling with Francis Bacon’s methods. To interpret science, we have to know something about its past. We have to continually ask not just “What have we discovered?” but also “Why did we look for it?” In no other way can we begin to grasp why we prize, or disregard, scientific knowledge in the way we do; or be able to distinguish between the promises that science can fulfill and those we should receive with some careful skepticism. Only then will we begin to understand science.

It is doubt that makes faith precious, deciet that makes honesty precious, grief that makes happiness precious, error that makes truth precious, fear that makes love precious, pride that makes humility precious, shame that makes honor precious, anger that makes peace precious, greed that makes contentment precious, despair that makes hope precious, cruelty that makes kindness precious, disloyalty that makes commitment precious, lawlessness that makes justice precious, vengance that makes forgiveness precious, frustration that makes patience precious, hatred that makes tolerance precious, disbelief that makes trust precious, uncertainty that makes confidence precious, skepticism that makes conviction precious, insolence that makes courtesy precious, impoliteness that makes manners precious, imprudence that makes civility precious, contempt that esteem precious, meanness that makes hospitality precious, stinginess that makes generosity precious, roughness that makes gentleness precious, negligence that makes discipline precious, and confusion that makes order precious.

Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness. There are many such, they are the heroes of our age. And they all recognized themselves in his work, they found that it confirmed them and raised them on high and celebrated them; they were grateful for this, and they spread his name far and wide. He had been young and raw with the times: ill advised by fashion, he had publicly stumbled, blundered, made himself look foolish, offended in speech and writing against tact and balanced civility. But he had achieved dignity, that goal toward which, as he declared, every great talent is innately driven and spurred; indeed it can be said that the conscious and defiant purpose of his entire development had been, leaving all the inhibitions of skepticism and irony behind him, an ascent to dignity. Lively, clear-outlined, intellectually

Let’s have a closer look at Sue. Appearance-wise, Jerry’s mother was a dark dream with full lips and almond eyes; fashion-wise, she spared no expense but looked as conservative as all the rest; in terms of morals she was entirely conventional; in personality a flirt; in outlook a skeptic; in disposition a bleak and dire depressive; in political mind-set more progressive than most; in matters of sex, boldly forward, then discreetly withholding; she was mercurial at parties and dances (a charmer one night, a mute the next); in love a total slave, but as an object of a man’s desire, she was a merciless and cunning manipulator. If her kindness was subject to moods, she had her table manners down cold, and her telephone etiquette was impeccable.

Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it. That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave. Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason.

The fundamentalist Christian stance has sometimes taken shape as an overreaction against a skeptical climate. In the face of intellectual and other challenges, the fundamentalist impulse is to preserve faith at any and all costs. Fundamentalism takes the form of a worry that on some level reason or science will undermine Christianity—which seems to mean ignoring them altogether. In such an environment, “faith” takes the form of holding on to a particular stance as a certainty, such that the possibility of questioning is immediately foreclosed. Such an impulse is often tied to particular views of Scripture or Genesis, but it shouldn’t be. As we have seen play out in culture, the most permissive approaches to Scripture’s teaching about sex sometimes lead to a rigid fundamentalism that endorses a liberal creed. The paradox is that while the fundamentalist’s faith is frequently loud and comes off as very certain, it lacks the prudential confidence to wisely, but truly, face up to the questions that confront it. It is driven by a vague sense of threats that it does not know how to respond to effectively and so ends up being reduced to shouting its answers while running away.7

Every human has a divine spark veiled by the layers of personality. Whether we call it Allah, Jesus, Elohim, Krishna, or any other name, that spark is the same and we are foolish not to realize our astounding potential. An essential spiritual practice is to observe and witness oneself continuously and compassionately, acknowledging and laughing at foibles and weaknesses while working relentlessly to evolve into higher consciousness. The light of persistent awareness is bound, little by little, to dissolve our false self and bring us closer to our authentic self. We may not become perfect human beings, but that is not the goal. The goal is to become more aligned with our higher self and expand our worldview as we learn to see the Face of God in everyone we meet. Institutions and those who serve institutions cannot be trusted to acknowledge their weaknesses and serve the common good, and we would be wise to emulate the Mulla’s healthy skepticism about their moral leadership. Our human understanding of divine verses, such as those in the Qur’an, can be less than divine. With grace and courage we must work to change or eliminate religious customs and scriptural interpretations that do not meet the test of divine compassion and generosity

And you must appear willing to marry me,” Oliver said. “I understand.” “Do you? It means you’ll have to act as if you enjoy my company.” To his surprise, a small smile curved her lips. “I believe I can manage that.” Then, as if realizing she was softening, she wiped the smile from her face. “But you must behave responsibly, too.” “By not trying to seduce you, you mean.” She started. “No! I mean, yes…I mean, you already said you have more urgent concerns.” Alarm rose in her cheeks. “Oh dear, I forgot that you also said you have no honor or morals.” He’d made similar assertions half his life, yet tonight he regretted making them. Shocking young ladies seemed to have lost some of its appeal. “All the same, Miss Butterfield, I promise that your virtue is safe from me.” When she looked skeptical, he added, “You’re not the sort of woman I prefer.” A respectable woman came with strings attached. “Of course I’m not,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Anyone can see that.” That took him aback. She went on. “A man with no morals isn’t going to want a woman who has them. She’d never let him do anything wicked.” Freddy coughed, as if choking on something. Oliver understood why. Miss Butterfield had an unnerving way of cutting everything down to its essence. “Yes,” he said, for lack of a better response. “Quite.” Then he narrowed his gaze on her. “So what did you mean when you said I had to ‘behave responsibly’?” “You promised to find my fiancé, and I expect you to hold to your word.” “Ah, right. Your fiancé?” He kept forgetting about that. It was hard to imagine any woman sailing off across the ocean to hunt down her fiancé. No female would ever do such a thing for him. Not that he’d want her to. That would mean someone cared for him more than was wise, given his character.

THE DISLODGING OF THE CARNAL MIND The rule of the carnal mind begins to be dislodged when we receive the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, and when we read the Word of God, pray, receive truth when confronted by brothers and sisters in Christ, minister to others in the Spirit, choose sound thinking in Christ, and so forth. Therefore, our carnal mind fights back. It seeks any pretext to break out against sound judgment (Prov. 18:1, RSV). It casts up seemingly wise thoughts, objections, and skepticisms, trying to involve us in unnecessary reasoning, clever sophistries, and “foolish . . . speculations” (2 Tim. 2:23). “It isn’t logical to believe that.” “You aren’t making sense.” “You have no business trying to help anyone else when you’re a mess yourself.” Anything will do—any thought, any seeming contradiction that must be resolved, any feelings that have to be settled. The most brilliant create the most clever smoke screens.

one very useful thing I’ve learned from economics is to be skeptical of advice from stockbrokers about the latest stock that’s sure to skyrocket. Saving you from losses isn’t as exciting as promising you millions, but it’s still pretty valuable. But the real point is that economics is about something more important than money. Economics helps you understand that money isn’t the only thing that matters in life. Economics teaches you that making a choice means giving up something. And economics can help you appreciate complexity and how seemingly unrelated actions and people can become entangled. These insights and others are sprinkled throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Money is nice, but knowing how to deal with it may be nicer. A student once told me that a professor of hers said that economics is the study of how to get the most out of life. That may strike some of you, even those of you who majored in economics, as an absurd claim. But life is all about choices. Getting the most out of life means choosing wisely and well. And making choices—being aware of how choosing one road means not taking another, being aware of how my choices interact with the choices of others—that’s the essence of economics. If

Rather, Venti and Wise explain, “most of the dispersion could be attributed to choice; some people save while young, others do not.” 229 Stanford professor Douglas Bernheim and his colleagues examined the issues and came to the same conclusion. Households “differ in the extent to which they can exercise self-discipline over the urge to spend current income.” 230 I was skeptical when I read this because it seemed too obvious. The secret to being wealthy is just to save more money while you’re young?

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of skeptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand.

It didn’t matter what expressions were on those famous faces at the moment the future erupted from Goettreider’s device—skeptical, awed, distracted, amused, jealous, angry, thoughtful, frightened, detached, concerned, excited, nonchalant, harried, weary, cheeky, or wise—they were all fatally irradiated. Hematopoietic degradation leading to aplastic anemia, irregular cell division, genetic warping, gastrointestinal liquefaction and vascular collapse, catastrophic neurological damage, coma, prayer, death.

Formalism has an austere elegance. It appeals to people like G.H. Hardy, Antonin Scalia, and me, who relish that feeling of a nice rigid theory shut tight against contradiction. But it's not easy to hold to principles like this consistently, and it's not clear it's even wise. Even Justice Scalia has occasionally conceded that when the literal words of the law seem to require an absurd judgment, the literal words have to be set aside in favor of a reasonable guess as to what Congress must have meant. In just the same way, no scientist really wants to be bound strictly by the rules of significance, no matter what they say their principles are. When you run two experiments, one testing a clinical treatment that seems theoretically promising and the other testing whether dead salmon respond emotionally to romantic photos, and both experiments succeed with p-values of .03, you don't really want to treat the two hypotheses the same. You want to approach absurd conclusions with an extra coat of skepticism, rules be damned.

Have you ever dared to imagine what life could be like … if we used our skills to transform conflict, to clean up the environment, and to invent a financial system that is fair? How it would be if we set up systems for wise governance, if we kicked out the cynics and gave medals to people who outlaw corruption? What would life be like if we were to bring the feminine and masculine into balance, to free women from millennia of oppression and release their creativity? What if we were able to have a pace of life that suited the soul? This book is your invitation. How This Book Works The foundation of this book is the leap in human consciousness. This first chapter introduces the ideas that propelled me to write it and describes my own journey. Chapter 2 will try to get as close as possible to a vision of what this leap is. Chapter 3 then takes us to meet some living examples of people who have done this—great people who have developed their self-awareness, shifted their consciousness, and become able to work for change in the world in a powerfully effective way. These are individuals who have dealt with the doubts and challenges of being a pioneer, such as speaking truth to power and picking yourself up when things fall apart. They have also, crucially, learned when skepticism is useful

… Communities repeat their central myths, the stories that make them a “cult” and give them an identity, in order to provide them a sense of social continuity. And so Americans tell themselves their “founding” stories over and over again, even though some of them are quite deranged and self-destructive: how the Founding Fathers were the homogenous embodiment of wisdom (when in fact the hated one another, mostly along Federalist and Republican lines); how these wise fathers created a Christian nation “under god” (when in fact many of them - Jefferson, Paine, Franklin - were Deistic skeptics) ; how the Second Amendment means that we all have the right to carry assault rifles; how everyone should strive for the American Dream understood as “success,” that “American bitch goddess” (William James), and so on. Deranged though they may be, these stories are comforting for many Americans, and so to challenge them is to invite vigorous debate if not a fistfight.

Over the past 15 years, both Internet stocks and houses have demonstrated the extraordinary excesses that can be created by combining an initially sensible thesis with well-publicized rising prices. In these bubbles, an army of originally skeptical investors succumbed to the “proof” delivered by the market, and the pool of buyers — for a time — expanded sufficiently to keep the bandwagon rolling. But bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop. And then the old proverb is confirmed once again: “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.

Another example of educational hype is in some ways the second coming of the growth mindset concept: ‘grit’. This is the idea, promoted by the psychologist Angela Duckworth, that the ability to stick to a task you’re passionate about, and not give up even when life puts obstacles in your path, is key to life success, and far more important than innate talent. The appetite for her message was immense: at the time of this writing, her TED talk on the subject has received 25.5 million views (19.5m on the TED website and a further 6m on YouTube; Angela Lee Duckworth, ‘Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance’, presented at TED Talks Education, April 2013), and her subsequent book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became a New York Times bestseller and continues to sell steadily. Like mindset, grit has become part of the philosophy of many schools, including KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, the biggest charter school group in the US, which teaches almost 90,000 students. To her credit, Duckworth has been concerned about how overhyped her results have become. She told an NPR interviewer in 2015 that ‘the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science’ (Anya Kamenetz, ‘A Key Researcher Says “Grit” Isn’t Ready For High-Stakes Measures’, NPR, 13 May 2015). A wise statement, given that the meta-analytic evidence for the impact of grit (or interventions trying to teach it) is extremely weak. See Credé et al., ‘Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (Sept. 2017): pp. 492–511. And Marcus Credé, ‘What Shall We Do About Grit? A Critical Review of What We Know and What We Don’t Know’, Educational Researcher 47, no. 9 (Dec. 2018): pp. 606–11.

In 380 BC, Plato wrote a dialogue, the Laches, in which Socrates and two Athenian generals seek to answer a seemingly simple question: What is courage? The generals, Laches and Nicias, had gone to Socrates to resolve a dispute between them over whether boys undergoing military training should be taught to fight in armor. Nicias thinks they should. Laches thinks they shouldn’t. Well, what’s the ultimate purpose of the training? Socrates asks. To instill courage, they decide. So then, “What is courage?” Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.” Socrates is skeptical. He points out that there are times when the courageous thing to do is not to persevere but to retreat or even flee. Can there not be foolish endurance? Laches agrees but tries again. Perhaps courage is “wise endurance.” This definition seems more apt. But Socrates questions whether courage is necessarily so tightly joined to wisdom. Don’t we admire courage in the pursuit of an unwise cause, he asks? Well, yes, Laches admits. Now Nicias steps in. Courage, he argues, is simply “knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped, either in war or in anything else.” But Socrates finds fault here, too. For one can have courage without perfect knowledge of the future. Indeed, one often must.

During this later, philosophically-focused part of his life, Socrates spent most of his time wandering around Athens, asking lots of questions, and challenging lots of men who the public believed to be wise. He would soon become very skeptical of the so-called wisdom of the time, finding that most men who claimed wisdom and were held to be wise were essentially just arrogant.

As Vico portrays heroic wisdom in the above passage it is social, a way to thinking that instructs, delights, and moves. The skeptic is unable to attempt heroism of thought. The skeptic suffers from a lack of courage, a timidity of soul, and little can be done about it by way of a cure. Heroic wisdom is connected to piety ( pietas), which is dutifulness not only toward God in Chris- tian doctrine but also, as in Platonic philosophy, toward parents, relatives, and one’s native country or city (De con. philos., ch. 4). Vico’s last words in the New Science are that this science is inseparably bound to the study of piety, and ‘‘he who is not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (NS 1112). Wisdom, as Joyce says, requires ‘‘a genuine dash of irrepressible piety’’ (FW 470.30–31) that the skeptic is unable to reach. Vico takes from Plato, but more accurately from the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition, three metaphysical doctrines: ideas as eternal truths, the immortality of the spirit or animus, which is subsumed under the human mind or mens as the seat of the eternal truths, and divine providence, that is, the divine mind that governs the eternal order of things and that is the ground whereby we come to know the eternal truths. Against these three doctrines Vico places the metaphysics of the Stoics and the Epicureans. He rejects the doctrine of fate ( fatum) of the Stoics because it denies free will. He rejects the doctrine of chance (casus) of the Epicureans because it explains everything in terms of void and body, denying the incorporeality of the mind.

the tyranny of short-termism is hard to resist. Jeff Bezos warns that taking the long view often means being “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” And this is a vital point. When you dare to apply a Slow Fix, the brickbats are never far behind—too indulgent, too expensive, too slow, the skeptics will cry. To weather the storm, make the case that fixing problems thoroughly is never an indulgence or a luxury; it is a wise and essential investment in the future. A problem left to fester now will almost always be harder and more costly to fix later on. Put in the time, effort, and resources today, and reap the benefits in your business, relationship, or health in the future.

A fool's dream oft is a wise man's nightmare, Yet visions render saints and madmen joy; As wak'd all at accord desire the fair, Though some to tender, others to destroy.

IF 1.Both logic and scientific theory support a given belief (Criterion 1), AND IF 2.Extensive scientific evidence confirms a given belief (Criterion 2), AND IF 3.There exists a community of highly credible and trustworthy people who hold the belief to be true (Criterion 3), AND IF 4.You have had direct personal experience which supports the belief (Criterion 4), AND IF 5.There are no good, reasonable, and responsible reasons for rejecting (i.e., no good reasons to be skeptical about) Criterion 1-4 (Criterion 5), THEN 6.It is wise and responsible to adopt this new belief and to do so with integrity.

For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful or [whatever.] But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That one moved…on an upward path toward some elevation, where…God knows what…I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day…and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself, this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench…. Which, of course, is another way of saying—despair.20

To gain the hearing of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus’ words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency — ​in short, our lack of grace — ​has proved so damaging that society will no longer look to us for the guidance it needs.

When we consider the events that have transpired under the auspices of Christianity, and the crimes committed in the name of its God - the genocide, subjugation, sadistic inquisitions, repression of natural instincts, suppression of women, sequestering of knowledge, reticence to disclose origins, negation and despiritualization of nature, and so on - we might find ourselves driven to uncover the truth that eludes so many. But even if we begin as skeptics, we can pose a few basic questions before the world. For example, we might ask whether Judeo-Christianity is the creation of man or God? Are its dogmatists interested in knowing God or controlling the minds of men? Is their business enlightenment or enslavement? Do the Scriptures champion reason or belief? Were its authors interested in truth or falsehood, clarity or confusion? For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent...Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen – (1 Corinthians 1:10, 27 & 28) No one will become generous and worthy from Christianity for it does not promote wisdom and learning and the Pagan writings that promote fortitude, prudence, and justice are ascribed to Satan and those who worship Satan – Flavius Claudius Julianus (Roman Emperor, circa 331-363 AD) Although we are afforded few reliable answers

I hope there is no God” passage, Nagel wrote that “[I] am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.” I, too, know a great number of very bright and knowledgeable people who are believers. It sometimes makes me wonder if the skeptics have it backward: maybe I am just not wise enough to be a believer.