#reasonin

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court. ↗

— Mark Twain

#cats #dogs #doves #foxes #geese

When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind. ↗

— Johannes Kepler

#cause #id #intelligent-design #kepler #naturalism

It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other. ↗

— Oliver Evans

#any #communication #each #frequently #happens

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#effectually #fear #mind #passion #powers

There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#act #animal #box #comparison #does

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#attribute #comes #everything #function #highest

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. ↗

— James Robinson

#believing #consists #finding #going #most

More by example than by word, my father taught me logical reasoning, compassion, love of others, honesty, and discipline applied with understanding. ↗

— Paul D. Boyer

#compassion #discipline #example #father #honesty

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#conviction #deep #emotional #forms #god

Being that 'reason is not antithetical to faith' (Woods) and that Pentecost established the Reality of super-nature (Lewis) and that 'theology matters' (Wimber), then 'empowered evangelicalism' (Nathan) is the natural expression of discipleship." ~R. Alan Woods [2013] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#duna #evangelicalism #faith #faith-reason #mis