John Allen Paulos

"Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down prelimina…"

"The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely e…"

"Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty."

"The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agn…"

"After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur."

"There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge."

"Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation."

"While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a h…"