#consensus

A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since. ↗

— Charles de Lint

#along #been #bunch #consensus #ever

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence! ↗

— Michael Denton

#coincidence #consensus #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution

Over the last decade, economists seemed to share a broad consensus about economic policy, with the old splits between monetarists and Keynesians apparently being settled by events. But the Great Recession of the last two years has changed everything. ↗

— Gavyn Davies

#apparently #being #between #broad #changed

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually. ↗

— Abba Eban

#collectively #consensus #everyone #individually #means

But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision. ↗

— Danny Glover

#around #been #begin #build #concerned

The Obama administration's attempted short-term fixes, even with unprecedented monetary easing by the Federal Reserve, produced average GDP growth of just 2.2% over the past three years, and the consensus outlook appears no better for the year ahead. ↗

— Glenn Hubbard

#ahead #appears #attempted #average #better

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War. ↗

— Douglas Hurd

#certainly #consensus #even #first #first world

The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order. ↗

— Anna Garlin Spencer

#common #consensus #earth #expression #feminine

Judy Garland's father was gay. That seems to be the consensus. They left Minnesota and went to California because he got caught with some boy backstage. ↗

— Judy Davis

#because #boy #california #caught #consensus

Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations - a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency - without ever reaching anything approaching consensus. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#approaching #argued #assassinations #centuries #consensus