A Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson

When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for that belief.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Quote Topics

Ad Belief Believing Discoveries Further Justified Left Rationale Reasons Something Susceptible Undermining Your

Quote Author

Neil deGrasse Tyson
American - Scientist
Born: October 5, 1958

Faith is believing things by definition, which are not justified by reason. If it were justified by reason, it wouldn't be faith. It would just be ordinary belief. It's something you can't prove. That's what faith is, believing something you can't prove.

Colin McGinn

Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc hypothesis [invented for a purpose] on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science.

James Bryant Conant

...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents.

Jonah Goldberg

Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.

Daniel Dennett

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

Ray Bradbury

You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?

Bryan Fuller

This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.

Terence McKenna

You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.

Evan Parker

It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Knowing that we'd meet Ruby at the point where she stopped believing, I knew I was also going to have to deal with what you do with your capacity for belief if you don't have an object for your belief.

K. M. Soehnlein

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

David Langford

There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are the same to within one part in 100,000. So if we are part of some finite structure then, if the gradient is so shallow, it is likely to go on much further.

Martin Rees

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.

Dan Barker

I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

Richard Dawkins

Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.