Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Deism claims that God creates the universe and the laws of nature and then is hands-off, with everything that subsequently happens in nature being due to natural processes.

Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.

I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.

Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.

When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.

In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.

Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.

"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.

I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

However much you love them, you must let everything and everybody that desperately long for their freedom to be free!

The soul awakens in times obscurity by divine grace.

Some People are more turned on by money than they are by love. In one respect they're alike. They're both wonderful as long as they last.

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

It's really hard for me to capture this certain way of singing that sounds good to me. I don't really understand it, but hopefully some day I'll figure it out.

There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes.

I definitely believe in ghosts.

I haven't been on a date in awhile. I went on maybe two dates in my whole life.

There, I'm an artist. Thousands of women on ecstasy now want to have three-ways with me.

When men give lines, women learn to not trust men. When women wear makeup, men learn to not trust women. Male lines and female makeup are divorce training.