Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015

Vaniver

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Depending on the perspective of the reader, this one's an attack either on faith or on explanations.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

-St. Thomas Aquinas

This is a highly suspicious quote. Aquinas was more or less a follower of Avicenna who thought faith and reason should be so close to each other that with good enough reasoning almost no faith should be necessary.

This comment here seems to argue it is a highly misleading paraphrasation of a text that means almost the opposite, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=a87v4a2tvmgo7pqkbp4fvj42l5&topic=3154091.msg30423351#msg30423351 but I suspect this PHPSESSID thing means it is not a permanent link.

Perhaps I should just copy it here:

"I... (read more)