Darwin’s theory described the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.
Precision can be suffocating.
I believe life not only obeys the laws of physics, but that life began because of those laws.
A Pope usually worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and died of exhaustion in an average of 6.3 years. The inside joke was that accepting the papacy was a cardinal’s ’fastest route to heaven.
I am not questioning God’s power! It is God who gave us reason and circumspection! It is God we serve by exercising prudence!
How about Panspermia?” Winston asked. “The notion that life on earth was seeded from another planet by a meteor or cosmic dust? Panspermia is considered a scientifically valid possibility to explain the existence of life on earth.
For every lunacy, there is an equal and opposite lunacy.
Since the beginning of time, the ignorant have always screamed the loudest... They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions. Now after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.
Having faith requires leaps of faith, cerebral acceptance of miracles – immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist scripture... they all carry similar requirements – and similar penalties. They claim that if I don’t live by a specific code I will go to hell. I can’t imagine a God who would rule that way.
I hope Ludwig van Beethoven gets his cut, Langdon thought, fairly certain that the original inventor of bone conduction technology was the eighteenth-century composer who, upon going deaf, discovered he could affix a metal rod to his piano and bite down on it while he played, enabling him to hear perfectly through vibrations in his jawbone.
Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads.
Unfortunately, Da Vinci was a prankster who often amused himself by quietly gnawing at the hand that fed him. He incorporated in may of his Christian paintings hidden symbolism that was anything but Christian – tributes to his own beliefs and a subtle thumbing of his nose at the Church.
Kirsch planned to go public with this presentation in a stunning, meticulously choreographed event. When he did, people across the world would realize that the teachings of all religions did indeed have one thing in common. They were all dead wrong.
I’ve heard of denial,” Langdon quipped blithely, “but I don’t think it exists.
Throughout history, every period of enlightenment has been accompanied by darkness, pushing in opposition. Such are the laws of nature and balance. And if we look at the darkness growing in the world today, we have to realize that this means there is equal light growing.
Well, this machine is no more me than your physical brain is you. Observing your own brain in a bowl, you would not say, ‘That object is me.’ We are the sum of the interactions taking place within the mechanism.
The key to our scientific future,... is hidden in our past.
Although many people erroneously interpreted apocalypse as a cataclysmic end of the world, the word literally signified an “unveiling,” predicted by the ancients to be that of great wisdom. The coming age of enlightenment.
And more recently, the world had been led to believe that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq.
As you may know, when someone endures a horrific event like a car accident or a sexual assault, the long-term memories can be permanently debilitating.