Adam Sedgwick Quotes

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural.

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.

Every mental state is also physical.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

An atheist is someone who thinks (but doesn't believe) that nothing created everything.

There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.