The Dream of Enlightenment Quotes

“A critic of the Bible who was more radical than Hobbes was Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), a French heretic who believed that the world would soon be run by a Jewish messiah acting in partnership with the king of France. La Peyrère was apparently of Marrano origin and probably met Spinoza. He argued that the Bible offered not an account of human history but only an account of the history of the Jews; that there were other men before Adam (in China, for example); and that the flood was merely a little local difficulty in Palestine. Spinoza”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“In Star Trek, for example, people regularly travel by a transporter beam which “dematerializes” them in one place for reassembly at another. But would such a beam need to carry the atoms of the original person or just information about those atoms? In several episodes of the series, the transporter goes wrong, and produces two persons (or perhaps we should say two bodies) at the destination. This implies that it transports only information, not atoms, and that the travellers’ bodies are destroyed at departure, then created afresh on arrival from new materials according to a transmitted blueprint.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“Give priests power and they soon start persecuting anyone who disagrees with them.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare.” God had something better in store for the righteous in heaven, but here below it was all buffeting and collision, both outside our heads and in them.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“Reports of miracles are like positive test results for very unusual diseases. They must be treated with extreme caution, because however remote the possibility of error or deceit may seem, it may still be less remote than the possibility that a miracle has occurred.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“Descartes’s grandiose ambitions even extended to “a system of medicine founded on infallible demonstrations.” He once said that the preservation of health had always been “the principal end of my studies,”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“The whole point of government, Spinoza maintained, is liberty: “the object of government is … to enable [men] to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice.” The state authorities may interfere in religion—indeed, they must do so, since religion is too dangerous to be left in the hands of priests.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“As to the … teaching of certain Churches, that God took upon Himself human nature … they seem to me to speak no less absurdly than one who might tell me that a circle has taken on the nature of a square.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“The true object of the miraculous stories narrated in the Bible was, Spinoza argued, “to move men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion … not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“God, or nature, has no use for such categories as good and bad.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“Just as nothing can be said to be either contrary to or in accordance with God’s will, so nothing is either good or bad from God’s perspective, which is to say from the point of view of nature or the universe as a whole:”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“The difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with God’s alleged omnipotence and mercy has, it can plausibly be argued, defeated every orthodox theologian in the history of monotheism.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“If He does not feel any pity or love towards His creatures, and if nothing that happens can be said to be contrary to His will, does that not make Him somewhat amoral? Perhaps. But the God of traditional religion presents problems of His own and is arguably even worse. For there is undoubtedly a great deal of unmerited misery and pain in the world, yet it seems that He only rarely if ever does anything about it.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“Leibniz invented the term “theodicy” (in its French and Latin forms) to mean the justification of God’s ways to man—or, as an unbeliever might put it, the art of making excuses on behalf of God. Among”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“there is, he reasoned, no such thing as evil or suffering from God’s point of view, and this explains why God never tries to do anything about it.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“was “to try always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world.”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

“What I am is a thinking soul, not a piece of matter, and I know about this soul and its thoughts better than I know about any physical thing. Because”
― Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy