Quotes & Sayings About Plausibility

Our current Western cultural plausibility structure elevates science and scorns and mocks religion, especially Christian teaching. As a result, believers in Western cultures do not as readily believe the supernatural worldview of the Bible in comparison with their Third World brothers and sisters. — J.P. Moreland

Facts and values are entangled in science. It's not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility and replicability. These are value commitments. — Alva Noe

The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure," a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one's own. — Lesslie Newbigin

Defend the Hope When Peter commanded these believers to give a defense, what were they supposed to defend? Traditional apologists are almost unanimous here. They say the first order of business is "reasoning for the existence of God."116 Craig says we are to defend the plausibility of God's existence as being more likely than not.117 That is not at all what Peter was saying in 1 Peter 3:15. Rather, he was commanding all Christians to give a defense for "the hope" that was in them. And what was their "hope"? It was not the plausibility of God's existence as being more likely than not. Their hope was in Christ. — Clifford B. McManis

It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened. — Mark Twain

Office tends to confer a dreadful plausibility on even the most negligible of those who hold it. — Mark Lawson

PROOF, n. Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one. — Ambrose Bierce

I would like to focus on the use of the word silly for a particular people's point of views. Everybody has what is called a plausibility structure; we all have sets of background beliefs through which we process and assess evidence. When you call something silly, you are merely saying, 'Relative to my plausibility structure that isn't within that structure.' That's merely a comment on your own psychology, there's nothing more to it so I don't find that very helpful," (Randal Rauser, Unbelieveable Feb. 1, 2014). — Randal Rauser

In contrast to the long period in which the plausibility structure of European society was shaped by the biblical tradition, and in which one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the self-evident truths, we are now in a situation where we have to take personal responsibility for our beliefs. — Lesslie Newbigin

They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable. — Kate Racculia

Holding me, as it were, within the infinite hope of your plausibility. — Peter Davis

Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have. — Henry Hazlitt

I can not but hate the prospect of slavery's expansion. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity. — Abraham Lincoln

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. — Richard Russo

Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes. — Michael Chabon

Plausibility is a trap for the truth laid by lies. — Yvan Audouard

He smiled at his glass. It seemed to be in on the joke. It fed daring and plausibility to the tiny flame of rebellion growing in his heart. Rahid — Karen Lord

The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. — James Wood

Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then — James Russell Lowell

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility. (p. 43) — Gail Jones

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all — Nikolai Gogol

Faith is timeless possibility. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Do you remember, Meir, that epigram quoted in the name of Rabbi Johanan ben Zaccai: 'There is no truth unless there be a faith on which it may rest'? Ironically enough the only sure principle I have achieved is this which I have known almost all my life. And it is so. For all truths rest ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, the sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and orderliness of the world of nature. In every realm one must lay down postulates or he shall have nothing at all. So with morality and religion. Faith and reason are not antagonists. On the contrary, salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion and to draw the fullness of their implications. It is not certainty which one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for. — Milton Steinberg

I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough. — Marilynne Robinson

When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults. — Vladimir Nabokov

We like to think that we think for ourselves, but it is not that simple. We think like the people we most admire and need. Everyone belongs to a community that reinforces the plausibility of some beliefs and discourages others. Berger notes that many have concluded from this fact that, because we are all locked into our historical and cultural locations, it is impossible to judge the rightness or wrongness of competing beliefs. — Timothy Keller

We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed — Thomas Gilovich

Instead, Taylor is concerned with the "conditions of belief" - a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable. — James K.A. Smith

For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence? — Joseph Duda

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison. — Margaret Fuller

Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called "natural world." Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don't seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really. — Seanan McGuire

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

After I had chased the ghastliness of Fancha out of my mind, I settled down to some planning. A trip out to Leavenworth had a deceptive plausibility. — John D. MacDonald

I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high degree of scientific plausibility. I'd also like to be six foot two and fifteen years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the character's name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I did very little in the way of targeted research. — Robert Reed

The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation. — Donald E. Westlake

three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible - because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations - voters, inventors, scientists - with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades. — Nick Bostrom

It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does. — Elmore Leonard

A rant is not an idea, and feeling hurt is not an argument. To be sure, how we make each other feel is not unimportant. But in our age of perpetual outrage, we must make clear that offendedness is not proof of the coherence or plausibility of any argument. Now is not the time for fuzzy thinking. Now is not the time to shy away from careful definitions. Now is not the time to let moods substitute for logic. These are difficult issues. These are personal issues. These are complicated issues. We cannot chart our ethical course by what feels better. We cannot build our theology based on what makes us look nicer. We can't abdicate intellectual responsibility because smart people disagree. — Kevin DeYoung

A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary. — William Hazlitt

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations ... He does not confuse truth with plausibility ... he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable ... The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy. — Denis Diderot

The word soul has lost its meaning and even its plausibility ... Faith, hope and love can no longer be seen simply as virtues or graces; they are processes in flesh and blood ... (the clergyman) will find that whether he wants it or not, he is also a front-line mental health worker or he will be so regarded by the specialists in mental health. It is on the pastoral role and the tasks of shepherding that the psychological disciples have the greatest impact in theological work. — Paul Pruyser

Anger is defined by philosophers as a long-standing and sometimes incurable mental ulcer, usually arising from weakness of intellect. In support of this they argue with some plausibility that this tendency occurs more in invalids than in the healthy, more in women than in men, more in the old than the young, more in those in trouble than in the prosperous. — Ammianus Marcellinus

No cardinal or essential doctrine is altered by any textual variant that has plausibility of going back to the original. The evidence for that has not changed to this day. — Lee Strobel

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. — Erich Fromm

Another way to describe the dilemma for religious faith is that pluralism creates social conditions in which God is no longer an inevitability. While it is possible to believe in God, one has to work much harder at it because the framework of belief is no longer present to sustain it. The presumption of God and of his active presence in the world cannot be easily sustained because the most important symbols of social, economic, political, and aesthetic life no longer point to him. God is simply less obvious than he once was, and for most no longer obvious at all - quite the opposite. — James Davison Hunter

He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong. — Arthur C. Clarke

A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal "profile" for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience's needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their "societal purpose" also requires that the media's interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups. — Noam Chomsky

I think the fault is more with historicists who have stubbornly failed to develop a good theory of historicity. By simply resting on the feeble laurels of prima facie plausibility ('Jesus existed because everyone said so') and subjective notions of absurdity ('I can't believe Jesus didn't exist!'), the existence of Jesus has largely been taken for granted, even by competent historians who explicitly try to argue for it. — Earl Doherty

Love covers a myriad of plausibility structures. — Carol Plum-Ucci

To be touched is, of course, to undergo something that comes from the outside, so I am, quite fundamentally, occasioned by that which is outside of me, which I undergo, and this undergoing designates a certain passivity, but not one that is understood as the opposite of 'activity.' To undergo this touch means that there must be a certain openness to the outside that postpones the plausibility of any claim to self-identity. The 'I' is occasioned by alterity, and that occasion persists as its necessary animating structure. Indeed, if there is to be self-representation, if I am to speak the 'I' in language, then this autobiographical reference has been enabled from elsewhere, has undergone what is not itself. Through this undergoing, an 'I' has emerged. — Judith Butler

But plausibility itself, in my view, is a tremendous step forward as we continue to marshal the courage to live meaningful lives in a universe that likely came into existence, and may fade out of existence, without purpose, and certainly without us at its center. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Paradoxes are less paradoxical in their reference to truth than most of the most plausible axioms. — Raheel Farooq

The business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history. — Lesslie Newbigin

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult. — Jaron Lanier

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil. — Randall Jarrell

Objective truth is difficult to come by, and even if you have it, what you can pass on to the next person is the story that you tell about it. In order for truth to be recognized as true, it has to be wrapped in plausibility. Just the same as lies. (Another Word: Plausibility and Truth — Daniel Abraham

Shouldn't children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn't we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence? — Richard Dawkins

On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture. — Cass Sunstein

Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil," and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a "horrible thing." He pointed out that "by a mysterious decree of God" the plague was afflicting all peoples, including Jews; that it raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were victims like everyone else; therefore the charge that they caused it was "without plausibility." He urged the clergy to take Jews under their protection as he himself offered to do in Avignon, but his voice was hardly heard against local animus. — Barbara W. Tuchman

[T]he degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system ... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems. — Jerry Fodor

Where I fail in accuracy, I hope I make up for it in plausibility. — Elizabeth Wein

On Writing: A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established. — Danielle Ackley-McPhail

The first thing any charlatan needs is nomenclature. A special language. Trappings. That's the true genesis of psychobabble terms such as 'disclosure' and 'in denial.' Every good con man needs plausibility ... — Andrew Vachss

Does this prove that our universe arose from nothing? Of course not. But it does take us one rather large step closer to the plausibility of such a scenario. And it removes one more of the objections that might have been leveled against the argument of creation from nothing as described in the previous chapter. There, "nothing" meant empty but preexisting space combined with fixed and well-known laws of physics. Now the requirement of space has been removed. But, remarkably, as we shall next discuss, even the laws of physics may not be necessary or required. — Lawrence M. Krauss

I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up. — Ian McEwan

What makes today's popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisingly vulgar expression of an ideological tradition that has, after many centuries, become so pervasive and habitual that most of us have no idea how to doubt its premises or how to avert its consequences. This is a fairly sad state of affairs, because those consequences have at times proved quite terrible. — David Bentley Hart

There is an air of plausibility which accompanies vulgar reasonings and notions, taken from the beaten circle of ordinary experience, that is admirably suited to the narrow capacities of some, and to the laziness of others. — Edmund Burke

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible
and perhaps uninteresting as well. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility. — Hannah Arendt

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee. — Walter Kaufmann

John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility. — Gordon R. Dickson

The worry that unreflective belief acquisition may be unreliable, after all, applies equally to reflective belief acquisition: it too may be unreliable. To my mind, the plausibility of internalist views about justification is dramatically decreased when one becomes vividly aware of what introspection and reflection actually achieve. — Hilary Kornblith

It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God. — John C. Lennox

That's the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility. — Chuck Palahniuk

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth's tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it'. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. — Bill Bryson

There is a confusing dual structure in the relationship of the individual to history. Even the sensory certainties of suffering follow a predictable order of physical reactions, so that the undeniable reality of their dizziness, queasiness, or nausea can be regarded with equal plausibility as the hysterical symptoms of a transitional period - a hypochondria of the epoch and not of individual people. — Andreas Bernard

My honesty now is merely a long-term investment in my own plausibility. Because there may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I'm honest. — Jo Nesbo

Dostoevsky's authorial activity is evident in his extension of every contending point of view to its maximal force and depth, to the outside limits of plausibility. He strives to expose and develop all the semantic possibilities embedded in a given point of view (Chernyshevsky, as we have seen, strove for the same thing in his Pearl of Creation). This Dostoevsky knew how to do with extraordinary power. And this activity, the intensifying of someone else's thought, is possible only on the basis of a dialogic relationship to that other consciousness, that other point of view. We — Mikhail Bakhtin

If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure? — Lesslie Newbigin

[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility. — Kingsley Amis