Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

We give you this our testimony; not the testimony of one or two persons, but of many, of persons…who would, if any, have temptations to become sceptical or discontented, but who have had in fact not any temptation to doubt ever since they were Catholics.

The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain. How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless.

After twenty-eight years as a believer, the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God. More than that, it points to a God who cares about human beings, and a God who is infinitely good and holy. The other observations…that point to a Creator—the fact that the universe had a beginning, that it obeys orderly laws that can be expressed precisely with mathematics, and the existence of a remarkable series of “coincidences” that allow the laws of nature to support life—do not tell us much about what kind of God must be behind it all, but they do point toward an intelligent mind that could lie behind such precise and elegant principles.

If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my view DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things than make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates.

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

The evidence for the existence of God is, if not actually coercive, so overwhelmingly strong that no man who was governed by reason would be content to leave this question undecided.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

If there isn’t any God, there isn’t any problem of evil. And if there is no God, then there is a problem of good! … . As Nietzsche pointed out, atheists who follow through on all the implications of their beliefs are nearly nonexistent. Most atheists do create an as if world. They act as if reason is connected to reality, at least for pragmatic purposes. They act as if, in a rough sort of way, things make sense. They act as if progress is the law of history. They act as if reason, justice, truth, compassion, solidarity, and love were more than mere breath expelled by lying lips. But they do not say how and why they believe that reason, justice compassion, and the rest are in some way better than irrationality, oppression, the big lie, ruthlessness, and cynicism. What metaphysical commitments justify these beliefs?

Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else… An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one… The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question, and most certainly he will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change.

For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.

Either truth is our highest epistemic goal and there is a state of the person called “believing truly”, or else we have no epistemic goal and we can engage in various cognitive projects without being held to an absolute standard by which those projects can be judged.

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it,
And look what it’s done so far.
What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?

I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is regularly visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkedly lemurs and bad ones who mutilate our cattle and want out water and our women. I believe the future sucks and I believe the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincidant with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state-to-state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe they are better then the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to germs so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the best poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed siberian shaman. I believe that man’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really DID taste better when I was a kid, that its aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, and that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time(Although if they don’t ever open the box it’ll just be two different types of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older then the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, and while all life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you may as well lie back and enjoy it.

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

If religion was based on scientific evidence, it would be called science, and no one would believe it.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it.

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics. But you don’t do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, crusades and jihads, holy wars and purges and pogroms, the Inquisition and burning of witches.

Q: So why do we insist on believing in God?

A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.

The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Then he’s tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he’d innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He’d found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn’t really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never. Never — in anything great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

It’s not what you believe, it’s what you’re doing for the world that matters.

‘That last one,’ said MacCruiskeen, putting away the knives, ‘took me three years to make and it took me another year to believe that I had made it.’

Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.

The best-kept secret today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than enjoy a pampered idleness.

Nothing changes more consistently than the past; the past that influences our lives is not what actually happened but what we believe happened.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

I did have a test today. It’s on European socialism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not European, I don’t plan on being European, so who [cares] if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. That still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any ism for that matter. Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism — he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me”. A good point there.

You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Take the blue pill and you wake up back in your apartment believing… whatever you want to believe. Or: take the red pill, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole really goes…

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith—acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through Sunday school. Metaphors are a a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.