A Quote by Jack McDevitt

Faith is conviction without evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contrary evidence. In some quarters, this quality is perceived as a virtue.

Jack McDevitt

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Contrary Conviction Even Evidence Face Faith Perceived Quality Quarters Some Sometimes Virtue Without

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Jack McDevitt
American - Author
Born: April 14, 1935

It ill becomes any of us to take the attitude that all evidence for God is false evidence, beneath consideration, simply by virtue of its being evidence for God, or even by virtue of its being outside the purview of science.

Kitty Ferguson

Faith is acting in the face of contrary evidence. The senses declare, "It cannot be," but Faith shouts above the turmoil, "It is!"

E. W. Kenyon

Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?

Clifford D. Simak

We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.

Bertrand Russell

Actually, he gave false evidence [of chemical weapons]. In this case,[John] Kerry didn't even present any evidence. He talked "we have evidence" and he didn't present anything. Not yet, nothing so far ; not a single shred of evidence.

Bashar al-Assad

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Richard Dawkins

I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us [...] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, [...] then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith, I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'

Richard Dawkins

Religion is faith. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief without evidence cannot be shared. Faith is a feeling. Love is also a feeling, but love makes no universal claims. Love is pure.

Penn Jillette

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'.

Richard Dawkins

There is evidence for the deity of Jesus -- good, strong, historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.

John Stott

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens

A powerful portfolio of physiological and behavioural evidence now exists to support the case that fish feel pain and that this feeling matters. In the face of such evidence, any argument to the contrary based on the claim that fish 'do not have the right sort of brain' can no longer be called scientific. It is just obstinate.

John Webster

But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.

Richard Dawkins

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

Joan Didion

Here's something that intrigues me: If you have faith, you believe regardless of the evidence, yet if there's ever evidence to support faith, everyone goes to it and points to it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Continuing to believe the same thing, even in the face of new evidence to the contrary, is the definition of insanity - except in politics where it's called leadership.

Scott Adams

A Quote by Jack McDevitt

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