Jacques Monod

1910 - 76, Nobel Prize-winning French biologist who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of microbiology, and is the author of the classic book "Chance and Necessity".

 

1.     A scientist who believes in god suffers from schizophrenia.

2.     Now, if we wanted to try to build what I would call, scientifically, a meaningful image of God, we would have to assume a certain number of finite, precise properties; we would, of course, agree that these properties could never be verified directly, but at least some of the consequences of these properties would be predictable. As I see it, the modern (or modernised) concept of God has none of these properties. The concept is assigned no definition clear or precise enough to make it amenable to experiments, to observation, which is, of course, a fundamental alteration in the minds of religious people. This is not the classical concept of God.

3.     Retreating into the mystery that cannot be approached is, from the point of view of science, unethical. Our duty as scientists is to consider that there is no mystery that is by definition impenetrable to analysis. Scientists are well-accustomed to the general problem of analysing something that they cannot see. This is what we call the ‘black box.’ And in fact this is how physicists have worked on atoms, because they never saw an atom—nobody has ever seen an atom. And similarly, there were entities called ‘genes’ that nobody could see, nobody knew what they were made of and still we could deduce a great many properties of these entities from experiments.

4.  The great religions are of a similar form, based on the story of the life of a peophet who, if not himself the founder of all things, represents that founder, speaks for him, and recounts the history of mankind as well as its destiny. Of all the great religions, Judeo-Christianity is probably the most primitive in its strictly historicist structure, being founded on the saga of a Bedouin tribe before being enriched by a divine prophet. Buddhism, which is more highly differentiated, is based in its original form on Karma, the transcending law governing individual destiny. Buddhism is a story of souls rather than of men.

5.     Why would God have to have chosen this extremely complex and difficult mechanism [Evolution] when, I would say by definition, he was at liberty to choose other mechanisms? Why would he have to start with simple molecules? Why not create man right away as, of course, the classical religions believed? I just don’t see the reasons, and no theologian has given me, yet, a good answer to that question.

6.     Natural selection is the blindest and the most cruel way of evolving new species…because it is a process of elimination, of destruction. The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethics revolts. An ideal society is a non-selective society, is one where the weak are protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law. I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.

-    Monod’s comment on the suggestion that God may have set the mechanism of Evolution in motion.

7.     Immanence is alien to modern science. Destiny is written as and while, not before, it happens … The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?

8.     The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

9.     Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.

10. Biology occupies a psoition among the sciences both marginal and central. Marginal because, the living world, constituting only a tiny and a very 'special' part of the universe, it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the ultimate aim of the whole of science is, indeed, as I believe, to clarify man's relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position, since of all the disciplines it is the one that ebdeavours to go directly to the heart of the problems that must be resolved before that of 'human nature' can even be framed in other than metaphysical terms.

11. When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. Nevertheless, a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence shows that this conception alone is compatible with the facts.

12. Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: it is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.

13. Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect, natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions. It is not to chance, but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.  That is the contribution of Necessity.   

14. The advent of man was completely unpredictable, until it actually happened.

15. We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.

16. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

17. There are living systems; there is no living 'matter.' No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.

18. Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

19. Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

20. For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas and that of the biosphere. For while the abstract kingdom stands at a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the non-living universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas. But one may at least try to define some of the principal factors involved in it. This selection must necessarily operate at two levels:  that of the mind itself and that of performance.

-    Monod had anticipated Richard Dawkins’ concept of the ‘meme’, the gene’s counterpart in the world of ideas.

21. I believe we can assert today that a universal theory, however completely successful in other domains, could never encompass the biosphere, its structure, and its evolution as phenomena deducible from first principles.

22. The biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events but constitutes a particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles, and therefore essentially unpredictable. Let there be no misunderstanding here. In saying that as a class living beings are not predictable upon the basis of first principles, I by no means intend to suggest that they are not explicable through these principles—that they transcend them in some way, and that other principles, applicable to living systems alone, must be invoked.

23. The scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.

24. In the course of three centuries, science, founded upon the postulate of objectivity, has won its place in society - in men's practice, but not in their hearts.

25. Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one.

26. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.

27. The invention of myths and religions, the construction of vast philosophical systems - they are the price man has had to pay in order to survive as a social animal without yielding to pure automatism. But a cultural heritage would not, all alone, have been strong or reliable enough to hold up the social structure. That heritage needed a genetic support to provide something essential to the mind. How else account for the fact that in our species the religious phenomenon is invariably at the base of social structure? How else explain that, throughout the immense variety of our myths, our religions and philosophical ideologies, the same essential 'form' always recurs?

28. It is perfectly true that science attacks values. Not directly, since science is no judge of them and must ignore them; but it subverst everyone of the mythical or philosophical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has based morality: values, duties, rights, prohibitions. 

29. In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.

Paul Dirac

1902 - 84, Nobel Prize winning British mathematician and theoretical physicist who was a pioneer in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, and whose famous 'Dirac equation' paved the way for the discovery of the positron and, in due course, to the rest of anti-matter.

1.     The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions.

2.     Belief in God merely encourages us to think that God wills us to submit to a higher force, and it is this idea which helps to preserve social structures that may have been perfectly good in their day but no longer fit the modern world.

3.     I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented.

4.     All this talk about God's will, about sin and repentance, about a world beyond by which we must direct our lives, only serves to disguise the sober truth.

5.     ‘Does God exist?’ I want to consider the question from the point of view of a physicist, not on the basis of faith or philosophical principles, which is really just sort of guessing or expressing one’s feelings. A physicist would need to make this question precise by understanding what is meant by a universe with a God and what is a universe without a God, having a clear distinction between the two types of universes, and then looking at the actual universe and seeing which class it belongs to.

-    at the 1971 Lindau Symposium of Nobel Laureates.

6.     If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.

7.     If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit.

8.     Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

9.     I dislike religious myths on principle if only because the myths of the different religions contradict one another. After all, it was purely by chance that I was born in Europe and not in Asia, and that is surely no criterion for judging what is true or what I ought to believe. And I can only believe what is true.

10. As for right action, I can deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I find myself: I live in society with others, to whom, in principle, I must grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a fair balance; no more can be asked of me.

11. It is the height of arrogance for any group of people to claim that they alone know the truth … There are hundreds of religions on this planet and it is impossible to know which one, if any, is correct.

12. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

13. I think it is the general rule that the originator of a new idea is not the most suitable person to develop it, because his fears of something going wrong are really too strong.

14. I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state.

15. A good deal of my research in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problem, but simply examining mathematical equations of a kind that physicists use and trying to fit them together in an interesting way, regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later to have an application. Then one has good luck.

16. The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.

17. The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulation a mathematics which get continually more advanced. This is only natural and to be expected. What however was not expected by the scientific workers of the last century was the particular form that the line of advancement of mathematics would take, namely it was expected that mathematics would get more and more complicated, but would rest on a permanent basis of axioms and definitions, while actually the modern physical developments have required a mathematics that continually shifts its foundation and gets more abstract. Non-euclidean geometry and non-commutative algebra, which were at one time were considered to be purely fictions of the mind and pastimes of logical thinkers, have now been found to be very necessary for the description of general facts of the physical world. It seems likely that this process of increasing abstraction will continue in the future and the advance in physics is to be associated with continual modification and generalisation of the axioms at the base of mathematics rather than with a logical development of any one mathematical scheme on a fixed foundation.

18. Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith... For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.

19. It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

20. It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment... It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.

21. When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave – how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessman is, the answer would be [that] it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, [or anything whatever]. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.

-    from Dirac’s address at the Indian Science Congress in January 1955.

22. The new theories, if one looks apart from their mathematical setting, are built up from physical concepts which cannot be explained in terms of things previously known to the student, which cannot even be explained adequately in words at all. Like the fundamental concepts (e.g., proximity, identity) which everyone must learn on his arrival into the world, the newer concepts of physics can be mastered only by long familiarity with their properties and uses.

23. If we accept the view of complete symmetry between positive and negative electric charge so far as concerns the fundamental laws of Nature, we must regard it as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive protons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about, these stars being built up mainly of positrons and negative protons. In fact, there may be half the stars of each kind. The two kinds of stars would both show exactly the same spectra, and there would be no way of distinguishing them by present astronomical methods.

-    concluding paragraph of Dirac’s Nobel Lecture, December 12 1933.

24. There is...an essential indeterminacy in the quantum theory, of a kind that has no analogue in the classical theory, where causality reigns supreme. The quantum theory does not enable us in general to calculate the result of an observation, but only the probability of our obtaining a particular result when we make the observation. This lack of determinacy in the quantum theory should not be considered as a thing to be regretted.

25. This statistical interpretation is now universally accepted as the best possible interpretation for quantum mechanics, even though many people are unhappy with it. People had got used to the determinism of the last century, where the present determines the future completely, and they now have to get used to a different situation in which the present only gives one information of a statistical nature about the future. A good many people find this unpleasant; Einstein has always objected to it. The way he expressed it was: "The good God does not play with dice". Schroedinger also did not like the statistical interpretation and tried for many years to find an interpretation involving determinism for his waves. But it was not successful as a general method. I must say that I also do not like indeterminism. I have to accept it because it is certainly the best that we can do with our present knowledge. One can always hope that there will be future developments which will lead to a drastically different theory from the present quantum mechanics and for which there may be a partial return of determinism. However, so long as one keeps to the present formalism, one has to have this indeterminism.

26. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first rate physicist to do second-rate work.

-    about the 1920s and 30s, the early years of Quantum Mechanics.

27. I think that this engineering education has influenced me very much in making me learn to tolerate approximations. My natural feelings were to think that only an exact theory would be worth considering. Now, engineers always have to make approximations. I learned that even a theory based on approximations could be a beautiful theory. I rather got to the idea that everything in nature was only approximate, and that one had to be satisfied with approximations, and that science would develop through getting continually more and more accurate approximations, but would never attain complete exactness.

-    Dirac commenting on how his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering helped him in his research.

28. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

-    Dirac’s comment on Oppenheimer’s poetry.









Robert Green Ingersoll

1833 - 99, called 'The Great Agnostic' and the 'Shakespeare of Oratory', Robert Green Ingersoll was the son of a poor itinerant Protestant Minister who went on to become America's foremost critic of orthodox Christianity and greates champion of science and reason in the second half of the 19th century. He was a top-notch lawyer and Attorney General of the State of Illinois, a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, and a prominent Republican politician who could have become Governor of Ilinois, and possibly even the President of the USA but for his agnostic views. A hugely popular orator, he used to address gatherings of 50,000 men and charge $3,500 per talk even in those days. A fine master of English prose, he is considered by many to have been second only to William Shakespeare in his felicity of expression and turn of phrase. Great writers like Mark Twain and scientists like Thomas Edison and Luther Burbank were among his admirers.

1. Every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood.

2. A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.

3. My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.

4. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.

5.  No man with a sense of humour ever founded a religion.

6. No human being has brain enough, or knowledge enough, or experience enough, to say whether there is, or is not, a God. Into this darkness Science has not yet carried its torch. No human being has gone beyond the horizon of the natural. As to the existence of the supernatural, one man knows precisely as much, and exactly as little as another. Upon this question, chimpanzees and cardinals, apes and popes, are upon exact equality.

7. Every cradle asks us, "Whence?" and every coffin, "Whither?" The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.

8. Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science.

9. An intelligent man cannot believe that a miracle ever was, or ever will be performed. Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

10. There are two ways -- the natural and the supernatural. One way is to live for the world we are in, to develop the brain by study and investigation, to take, by invention, advantage of the forces of nature, to the end that we may have good houses, raiment and food, to the end that the hunger of the mind may be fed through art and science. The other way is to live for another world that we expect, to sacrifice this life that we have for another that we know not of. The other way is by prayer and ceremony to obtain the assistance, the protection of some phantom above the clouds.

11. An honest God is the noblest work of man.

12. Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

13. These gods have been manufactured after numberless models, and according to the most grotesque fashions. Some have a thousand arms, some a hundred heads, some are adorned with necklaces of living snakes, some are armed with clubs, some with sword and shield, some with bucklers, and some have wings as a cherub; some were invisible, some would show themselves entire, and some would only show their backs; some were jealous, some were foolish, some turned themselves into men, some into swans, some into bulls, some into doves, and some into Holy Ghosts, and made love to the beautiful daughters of men. Some were married -- all ought to have been -- and some were considered as old bachelors from all eternity. Some had children, and the children were turned into gods and worshiped as their fathers had been. Most of these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance can hardly excite our astonishment.

14. Give me the storm and stress of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will but first let me eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. 

15. The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

16. Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that a man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded? Is it possible that a god delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honour and renown a god must win on such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a fire-fly.

17. If, with all the time at my disposal, with all the wealth of the resources of this vast universe, to do with as I will, I could not produce a better scheme of life than now prevails, I would be ashamed of my efforts and consider my work a humiliating failure.

18. I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.

19. On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design. If God created man -- if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank God?

20. We cannot depend on what are called “inspired books,” or the religions of the world. These religions are based on the supernatural, and according to them we are under obligation to worship and obey some supernatural being, or beings. All these religions are inconsistent with intellectual liberty. They are the enemies of thought, of investigation, of mental honesty. They destroy the manliness of man. They promise eternal rewards for belief, for credulity, for what they call faith. This is not only absurd, but it is immoral.

21. These religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes. To eat meat on Friday, to enjoy yourself on Sunday, to eat on fast-days, to be happy in Lent, to dispute a priest, to ask for evidence, to deny a creed, to express your sincere thought, all these acts are sins, crimes against some god, To give your honest opinion about Jehovah, Mohammed or Christ, is far worse than to maliciously slander your neighbour. To question or doubt miracles is far worse than to deny known facts. Only the obedient, the credulous, the cringers, the kneelers, the meek, the unquestioning, the true believers, are regarded as moral, as virtuous. It is not enough to be honest, generous and useful; not enough to be governed by evidence, by facts. In addition to this, you must believe. These things are the foes of morality. They subvert all natural conceptions of virtue.

22. I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the starless night -- blown and flared by passion's storm -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

23. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

24. To hate man and worship God seem to be the sum of all creeds.

25. The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.

26. The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

27. My principal objections to orthodox religion are two - slavery here and hell hereafter.

28. All “inspired books,” teaching that what the supernatural commands is right, and right because commanded, and that what the supernatural prohibits is wrong, and wrong because prohibited, are absurdly unphilosophic. And all “inspired books,” teaching that only those who obey the commands of the supernatural are, or can be, truly virtuous, and that unquestioning faith will be rewarded with eternal joy, are grossly immoral.

29. Through all the centuries gone, the mind of man has been beleaguered by the mailed hosts of superstition. Slowly and painfully has advanced the army of deliverance. Hated by those they wished to rescue, despised by those they were dying to save, these grand soldiers, these immortal deliverers, have fought without thanks, laboured without applause, suffered without pity, and they have died execrated and abhorred. For the good of mankind they accepted isolation, poverty, and calumny. They gave up all, sacrificed all, lost all but truth and self-respect.

30. Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once reuired to be an infidel, to brave the Church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons, her tongues of fire -- to defy and scorn her heaven and her hell -- her devil and her God?

31. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.

32. The Church hates a thinker for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

33. The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.

34. The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race. Everywhere and at all times, it has opposed the liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and of intellectual development. It has denied the existence of facts, the tendency of which was to undermine its power. It has always been carrying fagots to the feet of Philosophy. It has erected the gallows for Genius. It has built the dungeon for Thinkers. And to-day the orthodox church is as much opposed as it ever was to the mental freedom of the human race.

35. How has the church in every age, when in authority, defended itself? Always by a statute against blasphemy, against argument, against free speech. And there never was such a statute that did not stain the book that it was in and that did not certify to the savagery of the men who passed it.

36. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment.

37. Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. Whoever investigates a religion as he would any department of science is called a blasphemer. Whoever contradicts a priest; whoever has the impudence to use his own reason; whoever is brave enough to express his honest thought, is a blasphemer. When the missionary speaks slightingly of the wooden god of a savage, the savage regards him as a blasphemer. To laugh at the pretensions of Mohammed in Constantinople is blasphemy. To say in St Peter's that Mohammed was a prophet of God is blasphemy. There was a time when to acknowledge the divinity of Christ in Jerusalem was blasphemy. To deny his divinity is now blasphemy in New York.

38. Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny and hypocrisy.

39. A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.

40. In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.

41. Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

42. Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbours, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

43. For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between science and faith.

44. There is the same difference between religion and science that there is between a madhouse and a university -- between a fortune teller and a mathematician -- between emotion and philosophy -- between guess and demonstration.

45. Supernatural religion will fade from this world, and in its place we shall have reason. In the place of worship of something we know not of, will be the religion of mutual love and assistance - the great religion of reciprocity. Superstition must go. Science will remain.

46. When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free from all the “called” and “set apart” — free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods.

47. The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

48. If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

49. I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities, its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believe in the existence of devils — talked and made bargains with them, expelled them from people and animals...These stories about devils demonstrate the human, the ignorant origin of the New Testament. I gave up the New Testament because it rewards credulity, and curses brave and honest men, and because it teaches the infinite horror of eternal pain.

50. Did it ever occur to you that if God wrote the Old Testament, and told the Jews to crucify or kill anybody that disagreed with them on religion, and that this God afterward took upon himself flesh and came to Jerusalem, and taught a different religion, and the Jews killed him -- did it ever occur to you that he reaped exactly what he had sown?

51. If Christ, in fact, said "I came not to bring peace but a sword," it is the only prophecy in the New Testament that has been literally fulfilled.

52. If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before him, like a panorama, moved the history yet to be. He knew exactly how his words would he interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name...Why did he not tell his disciples, and through them the world, that man should not persecute, for opinion's sake, his fellow-man? Why did he not cry, You shall not persecute in my name; you shall not burn and torment those who differ from you in creed?

53. Christ never wrote a solitary word of the New Testament - not one word. There is an account that he once stooped and wrote something in the sand, but that has not been preserved. He never told anybody to write a word. He never said, "Mathew, remember this. Mark, do not forget to put that down. Luke, be sure in your gospel you have this. John, do not forget it." Not one word. And it has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature.




54. I know that religious people cling to the Bible on account of the good that is in it, and in spite of the bad. I know that Freethinkers throw away the Bible on account of the bad in it, in spite of the good. I hope the time will come when the book will be treated like other books and will be judged upon its merits, apart from the fiction of inspiration.




55. The Bible is not inspired in its morality, for the reason that slavery is not moral, that polygamy is not good, that wars of extermination are not merciful, and that nothing can be more immoral than to punish the innocent on account of the sins of the guilty...Suppose there were no passages in the bible except those upholding slavery, polygamy, and wars of extermination, would anybody claim that it was the word of God? I would like to ask if there is a Christian in the world who would not be overjoyed to find that every one of these passages was an interpolation?




56. God improves as man advances.




57. The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The Council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the Father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Saviour.




58. [Christ] came, they tell us, to make a revelation, and what did he reveal? "Love thy neighbor as thyself"? That was in the Old Testament..."Return good for evil"? That was said by Buddha seven hundred years before he was born. "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you"? This was the doctrine of Lao-tsze. Did he come to give a rule of action? Zoroaster had done this long before: "Whenever thou art in doubt as to whether an action is good or bad, abstain from it." Did he come to teach us of another world? The immortality of the soul had been taught by Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans hundreds of years before he was born.

59. For many centuries the church filled the world with devils -- with malicious spirits that caused storm and tempest, disease, accident and death -- that filled the night with visions of despair; with prophecies that drove the dreamers mad. These devils assumed a thousand forms -- countless disguises in their efforts to capture souls and destroy the church. They deceived sometimes the wisest and the best, made priests forget their vows. They melted virtue's snow in passion's fire, and in cunning ways entrapped and smirched the innocent and good. These devils gave witches and wizards their supernatural powers, and told them the secrets of the future. Millions of men and women were destroyed because they had sold themselves to the Devil.

60. But let me ask the clergy a few questions: How did your Devil, who was at one time an angel of light, come to sin? There was no other devil to tempt him. He was in perfectly good society -- in the company of God -- of the Trinity. All of his associates were perfect. How did he fall? He knew that God was infinite, and yet he waged war against him and induced about a third of the angels to volunteer...Why did God create those angels, knowing that they would rebel? Why did he deliberately sow the seeds of discord in heaven, knowing that he would cast them into the lake of eternal fire?... Why does God allow these devils to enjoy themselves at the expense of his ignorant children?...Does he want his children misled and corrupted so that he can have the pleasure of damning their souls?

61. All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.

62. Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural.

63. Let every minister answer: If you knew the devil had written a work on human slavery, in your judgment, would he uphold slavery, or denounce it? Would you regard it as any evidence that he ever wrote it, if it upheld slavery? And yet, here you have a work upholding slavery, and you say that it was written by an infinitely good God!

64. The absurdity of the doctrine known as "The Fall of Man," gave birth to that other absurdity known as "The Atonement." So that now it is insisted that, as we are rightfully charged with the sin of somebody else, we can rightfully be credited with the virtues of another. Let us leave out of our philosophy both these absurdities.

65. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child...What right have you...Mr.Clergyman...to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear?

66. It is told that the great Michelangelo, in decorating a church, painted some angels wearing sandals. A cardinal looking at the picture said to the artist: "Whoever saw angels with sandals?" Michelangelo answered with another question: "Whoever saw an angel barefooted?"

67. It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions--some one who had the grandeur to say his say. I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church." On the prow of of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success.

68. Let us be honest. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of the world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine? — as much for science as Charles Darwin?

69. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called "faith."

70. What man can believe that blood can appease God? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that belief. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.

71. Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this most infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted, of the tears it has caused, of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renders God the basest and most cruel being in the universe. Compared with him, the most frightful deities of the most barbarous and degraded tribes are miracles of goodness and mercy. There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god.

72. Ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.

73. It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.

74. I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart.

75. The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.

76. The church has always been willing to swap off treasuries in heaven forcash down.

77. Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of ‘inspiration.’ It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge—that is to say, of science.

78. When worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.

79. Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labours of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.

80. The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody.

81. We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles...Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.




82. I do not believe in forgiveness as it is preached by the church. We do not need the forgiveness of God, but of each other and of ourselves. If I rob Mr. Smith and God forgives me, how does that help Smith? If I, by slander, cover some poor girl with the leprosy of some imputed crime, and she withers away like a blighted flower and afterward I get the forgiveness of God, how does that help her? If there is another world, we have got to settle with the people we have wronged in this. No bankrupt court there. Every cent must be paid.

83. The old lady who said there must be a devil, else how could they make pictures that looked exactly like him, reasoned like a trained theologian -- like a doctor of divinity.

84. With soap, baptism is a good thing.

85. Nothing has the same prospect of longevity as a good religious lie.

86. One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.

87. Is it possible that an infinite God created this world simply to be the dwelling place of slaves and serfs? Simply for the purpose of raising orthodox Christians? That he did a few miracles to astonish a few of them? That all the evils of life are simply his punishments, and that he is finally going to turn heaven into a kind of religious museum filled with Baptist barnacles, petrified Presbyterians and Methodist mummies?

88. I would have the Pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God -- is not infallible -- but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their "flocks" to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

89. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago. These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man.

90. It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon the book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.

91. [On Thomas Paine] He had more brains than books; more sense than education;more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He had no veneration for old mistakes -- no admiration for ancient lies. He loved the truth for the truth's sake, and for man's sake. He saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere; hypocrisy at the altar, venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong, of the enslaved many against the titled few.

92. [On William Shakespeare] More than three centuries ago, the most intellectual of the human race was born. He was not of supernatural origin. At his birth there were no celestial pyrotechnics...The cradle in which he was rocked was canopied by neither myth nor miracle, and in his veins there was no drop of royal blood. This babe became the wonder of mankind. Neither of his parents could read or write. He grew up in a small and ignorant village on the banks of the Avon, in the midst of the common people of three hundred years ago. There was nothing in the peaceful, quiet landscape on which he looked, nothing in the low hills, the cultivated and undulating fields, and nothing in the murmuring stream, to excite the imagination -- nothing, so far as we can see, calculated to sow the seeds of the subtlest and sublimest thought. So there is nothing connected with his education, or his lack of education, that in any way accounts for what he did...Many have tried to show that he was, after all, of gentle blood, but the fact seems to be the other way. Some of his biographers have sought to do him honour by showing that he was patronized by Queen Elizabeth, but of this there is not the slightest proof. As a matter of fact, there never sat on any throne a king, queen, or emperor who could have honoured William Shakespeare.

93. [On Charles Darwin] This century will be called Darwin's century...Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the Bible is a book written by ignorance -- at the instigation of fear...He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts.