David Brooks Quotes

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

Logic and faith don't occupy the same side.

Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

Many children are taught to believe in God. I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.

My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years, I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate.

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

The basis of religion is independent of science. Theology, not religion, is the antithesis to science

Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were taught in all the other classes.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

Faith is not contrary to reason.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.

Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.

Science stands for rational thought, faith for superstition and unreason.

When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.