Given our puny knowledge, we can’t not accept living in the midst of mystery. It is precisely because mystery exists and is so great around us that those who claim to hold the keys to the mystery cannot be trusted.

All the living beings upon our planet have a common ancestor, so we are relatives to the ladybugs.

Philosophy school textbooks tell us that the first philosophical school was the Ionic school, which consisted of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

Henri Bergson wrote that religion was society’s defense against the caustic power of intelligence.

Without wishing to diminish the importance of what they have been able to see, I think that they underestimate the cumulative nature of science, which is equally undeniable and plays a critical role, especially in the moments of greatest change. They fail to see that what changes in scientific revolutions is not what could reasonably be expected to

Second, we must construct a credible and consistent alternative to the old image of the world.

the general idea that the world may be different from how we perceive it: to better understand the world, it may be necessary to radically revise our image of it.

scientific knowledge is not what we can verify directly, as positivists expected. On the contrary, it is based on theoretical constructs that can be contradicted by empirical observations. We hold valid a theory that offers predictions that are corroborated as long as it has never been contradicted (“falsified”) by reality.

For Kuhn, a scientific theory is a conceptual framework, a “paradigm,” for describing a series of phenomena.