Untestable Quotes & Sayings

In seasons of severe trial, the Christian has nothing on earth that he can trust to, and is therefore compelled to cast himself on God alone. When no human deliverance can avail, he must simply and entirely trust himself to the providence and care of God. Happy storm that wrecks a man on such a rock as this! O blessed hurricane that drives the soul to God
and God alone! — Charles Spurgeon

I'm basically a fearful person. I'm a phobic person. — Spalding Gray

States will invent obscure constructs like "white privilege" and "male privilege" because they are convenient to further the state's ends. They are untestable, unmeasurable, and unprovable, but they sound legitimate to those who consider themselves a casualty of society. Despite the lack of evidence, they put the burden on the white male to disprove the accuser. Since no such constructs exist, no method of defense is possible. — Stefan Molyneux

Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible. — Regina Spektor

Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain. — Michio Kaku

Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature - to say nothing of killing and dying for them - would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now? — Sam Harris

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation say under shelter. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I argue that the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion - including faith, dogma, and revelation - is unreliable and leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Indeed, by relying on faith rather than evidence, religion renders itself incapable of finding truth. — Jerry A. Coyne

The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification-the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit. — Karl Popper

You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush - if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn't need a costume. You'd give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There's no doubt about it. — Tommy Chong

Professor Dawkins himself stated that "Religion is about turning untested belief, into unshakable truth through the power of institutions, and the passage of time." This is exactly what is happening with his meme conjecture. He is taking an untestable idea, by scientific standards, and through media and literature and a popular cult following, creating it into a social norm of truth where others believe his idea and propagate it as an unshakeable truth. This also is occurring faster because of computer technology in time. But nonetheless, it is an occurrence within a passage of time. — Idav Kelly

Economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans. — Joan Robinson

Big bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth. — Geoffrey Burbidge

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts.
And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings. — Greta Christina

The "pursuit of happiness" is such a key element of the "American (ideological) dream" that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: "We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Where did the somewhat awkward "pursuit of happiness" come from in this famous opening passage of the US Declaration of Independence? The origin of it is John Locke, who claimed that all men had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property - the latter was replaced by "the pursuit of happiness" during negotiations of the drafting of the Declaration, as a way to negate the black slaves' right to property. — Slavoj Zizek

An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads. — Richard Whately

This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed - however obliquely and at a terrible price - by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions - Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God - for us to do this. — Sam Harris

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. — Jon Jones

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved ... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. — A.J. Ayer

Shall be verra pleased when he's taken his damned cheroots — Diana Gabaldon

I regularly go hiking with my dog in L.A. — Alyssa Sutherland