Atheists From England

"The most original novelist now writing in English."

"Un des plus grands romanciers que l'Angleterre ait jamais eus. ("One of the greatest novelists that England has ever had.")"

"Pushing forty? She's clinging on to it for dear life!"

"Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down."

"Time has too much credit," said Bridget. "I never agree with the compliments paid to it. It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary."

"In the age of the concentration camp, when from 1935 to 1947 or so, she wrote her very best novels, no writer did more to illumine the springs of human cruelty, suffering and bravery."

"Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth," said his cousin. "But we seem to have no other."

"A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit."

"Well, of course, people are only human," said Dudley to his brother, as they walked to the house behind the women. "But it really does not seem much for them to be."

"As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots."

"Get rid of those terrible jeans that everybody else wears. And wear something different for a change, so you don't just look like a clone."

"(Martin Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"In seeking to refound philosophy as an analytic discipline, Ayer was not just trying to separate philosophy from life but to liberate life from philosophy. As he saw it, philosophers had traditionally set out to establish themselves as authorities on the fundamental nature of the universe and the character of right and wrong. They posited immutable laws of nature, claimed to show that the world was one, or pretended to demonstrate the existence of supersensible realms of being; they invented gods, divine commands and human ends, and sought in that way to tell people how to live. To Ayer all this was not only unjustified — talk of supernatural reality, of beings existing outside space and time, or of the fundamental unity of things was literally senseless — but also reactionary. In narrowing the possibilities of experience, in placing limits on the findings of science and in dictating what was right and wrong, philosophy had become a cramping distorting discipline. The promise of life after death, the conception of earthly life as representing a punishment for inherited sin, the belief that pleasure was evil, had terribly oppressive effects. With metaphysics banished, science could develop unfettered, and people would become more experimental, more open to other points of view, more tolerant in thought and practice. They would, in particular, become less likely to engage in religious and ideological wars. Above all else, Ayer hoped, men and women would realise that this life was the only life they have, and would thus become more appreciative of what it had to offer. Which is where the football, the dancing and the love affairs come in."

"Freddie became so much nicer after he died. He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people."

"Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged? Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now."

"He was the antithesis of the philosopher of mystery and intimation, and he was not tempted to technicality. He lived assertively and was vain and cocksure — at some cost to his philosophical reputation, since other philosophers were as human in their judgements on him. He was also honest, humane, and more or less on the Left in politics. He liked society, was a man of many women, came to be self-judging, and after some sadness died bravely, on 27 June 1989."

"Ayer’s central mistake was to think that his principle could distinguish between the meaningful and meaningless. This error has two parts. First, a better distinction would be between the objective and subjective. … The second part of the mistake is to make the distinction binary where it should be spectral. … Ayer found himself caught in a classic philosophical predicament. If an idea is too vague it will be dismissed as woolly and hand-waving. Too precise, however, and the logic-choppers will be out to unpick its contradictions and inconsistencies. As Aristotle’s immortal adage states, ‘It is the mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits’ – nor less, we might add. The Goldilocks state of philosophy is to be precise enough to be saying something substantive but not so precise as to ride roughshod over the complexities and ambiguities of the real world."

"He was undoubtedly one of the liveliest figures on the British philosophical scene in his time and, when he appeared on it, it was in need of enlivening. He was not a highly original thinker. His impact was due to the brilliance with which he arranged and expressed the ideas he had acquired from others. Perhaps his greatest intellectual virtue was his unremitting adherence to clarity and to rational argument. His work is without allusions, undeveloped suggestions, obscurity, and mannerism. Through his books and his teaching he sets a fine example of intellectual discipline."

"The principles of logic and mathematics are true simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies."

"If now I…say "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning — that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "Stealing money!!" — where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed."

"The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution."

"To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone."

""I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principle. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And, consequently, any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure."

"To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction."

"I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before."

"The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery."

"I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions."

"While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them."

"It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort."

"The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false."

"I am using the word "perceive". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object that it is perceived does carry the implication that it exists."

"No moral system can rest solely on authority."

"There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis — about the meaning of what we say — and there is all of this … all of life."

"I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts."

"The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved."

"There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed."

"And John took me by the elbow and he led me, kind of politely, away from the group, and he said to me, "Clearly Judas -- clearly -- Jesus is clearly setting out to fulfil the prophecy. Clearly." Now, John was the sort of person who would use the word 'clearly' repeatedly in a sentence as if that relieved him of the responsibility of actually making what it was he was saying clear. You probably know someone like that."

"Hang on a minute, mate. Who's the sole arbiter of taste in stand-up comedy? Who's the self-appointed moral judge of right and wrong in stand-up comedy? It's me, I am! It's been me for about 17 years now"

"Remember, all that's required for Jeremy Clarkson to triumph is that Richard Hammond do nothing."

"David Cameron never mentions it, but the Conservative Party won a by-election in Birmingham, and they sent out little kids with leaflets that said, "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour." And if political correctness has achieved one thing, it's to make the Conservative Party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.""

"It really worries me that 84% of this audience agrees with that statement, because the kind of people that say "political correctness gone mad" are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action to attack minorities or people that they disagree with. I'm of an age that I can see what a difference political correctness has made. When I was four years old, my grandfather drove me around Birmingham, where the Tories had just fought an election campaign saying, "if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour," and he drove me around saying, "this is where all the niggers and the coons and the jungle bunnies live." And I remember being at school in the early 80s and my teacher, when he read the register, instead of saying the name of the one asian boy in the class, he would say, "is the black spot in," right? And all these things have gradually been eroded by political correctness, which seems to me to be about an institutionalised politeness at its worst. And if there is some fallout from this, which means that someone in an office might get in trouble one day for saying something that someone was a bit unsure about because they couldn't decide whether it was sexist or homophobic or racist, it's a small price to pay for the massive benefits and improvements in the quality of life for millions of people that political correctness has made. It's a complete lie that allows the right, which basically controls media now, and international politics, to make people on the left who are concerned about the way people are represented look like killjoys. And I'm sick, I'm really sick-- 84% of you in this room that have agreed with this phrase, you're like those people who turn around and go, "you know who the most oppressed minorities in Britain are? White, middle-class men." You're a bunch of idiots."

"The twisting of the idea of 'political correctness' into a soft, one-size-fits-all punchbag for the right-wing media and your nan is a personal bugbear of mine [...] . In 2008, Edward Stourton published It's a PC World, which explained everything I ever wanted to say on the subject far more eloquently than I ever could have, and used actual statistical facts to back it up. Because no one can imagine a remotely pro-political correctness book, Stourton's book was, tellingly, misfiled by bookshops in the humour section, alongside Richard Littlejohn's Hell in a Handcart, those crappy politically correct fairy tales books and Al Murray's Pub Landlord annuals. Pundits on the Right like to imagine we live in a PC dictatorship, but the fact remains that in a high-street bookshop it is assumed that any book with PC in the title must be a hilarious attack on PC, rather than a book in its defence, because the only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them."

"I was sorry to see the News of the World go down, I think it was a great campaigning newspaper. Who can forget the News of the Worlds high profile campaign against child sex offenders which led to News of the World readers burning down the home of a paediatrician, throwing rocks at a pedalo, stamping on a centipede."

"There are two other words I do not understand — awareness and intelligence. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean? It is probably because I am a mathematician and mathematicians do not mind so much about that sort of thing. They do not need precise definitions of the things they are talking about, provided they can say something about the connections between them."

"Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. So we are not exactly computers. There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that. So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. The trouble is that if I did that — and I actually didn't do it — the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future"

"Reading about the lives of geniuses can be a powerful antidote against any envy we might feel for not being among their number. Almost invariably they turn out not only to have had the same flaws, trials and heartbreaks as the rest of us but to be deeply weird to boot. The Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Roger Penrose certainly fits the template."

"Although I'm regarded as a dangerous radical by particle physicists for proposing that there may be loss of quantum coherence, I'm definitely a conservative compared to Roger. I take the positivist viewpoint that a is just a and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation. I think Roger is a Platonist at heart but he must answer for himself."

"Whereas originally the hopes for string theory, and its descendants, were that some kind of uniqueness would be arrived at, whereby the theory would supply mathematical explanations for the measured numbers of experimental physics, the string theorists were driven to find refuge in the strong anthropic argument in an attempt to narrow down an absolutely vast number of alternatives. In my own view, this a very sad and unhelpful place for a theory to find itself."

"[I]n the June, 1960 issue of... the ', there appeared a paper by... Roger Penrose with the esoteric title "A Approach to General Relativity." Although the paper was highly mathematical, it outlined a very elegant and streamlined technique for solving certain problems in general relativity. ...this new method made some computations almost easy."

"One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!"