Douglas Adams Quotes
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books, 1979.
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
This is as opposed to religion where usually we want unshakable faith, In science, we want our faith to be shakable when new data are discerned or new theories are developed.
He was one of many who had been profoundly influenced by Spinoza on this critical point. See {624859}.
Many politicians have used this quote in recent years, but Moynahan seems to be the first.
Adams is best known as the author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame. Adams was known as an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, as a lover of fast cars, cameras, technological innovation and the Apple Macintosh, and as a "devout atheist".
