Word: proof
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...downright engineering excellence that is unmatched in the industry. Indeed, in an age when much of American business seems to have slipped into a search for quick profits and is marked by shoddy workmanship, the 104,000 engineers, designers, draftsmen, machinists, executives and salesmen of Boeing stand out as proof that, over the long haul, the only lasting standard of value in any market is quality itself. Said Air Force Secretary Hans Mark of the Pentagon's decision to award the cruise contract to Boeing: "Both contractors turned in good products. The differences between the two designs were small...
...Moral Proof. This is essentially Küng's approach. Conscience doth make Christians - or at least theists...
...Mental Proof. In this formulation, an all-intelligent Being is offered as the only explanation for the power of reason and for humanity's other nonmaterial qualities of mind and imagination. A contemporary restatement is the 1947 classic Miracles by the late English literary critic C.S. Lewis, the century's most read apologist for God. Lewis dismissed the philosophy that mind results from nature: "If any thought is valid, an eternal, self-existent Reason must exist and must be the source of my own imperfect and intermittent rationality...
...Experiential Proof. Because religious experiences are so widespread, this argument runs, there must be something (or rather, Someone) inspiring them. Skeptics, of course, reply that experiences are subjective, hence unreliable as evidence, and besides they can be explained apart from God. Harvard's Quine, for example, dismisses beliefs as the product of "tradition, wishful thinking or something in the genes." However, one of Britain's most distinguished zoologists, Alister Hardy, begs to wonder. A project he founded at Oxford has issued a rigorous scientific study of 3,000 religious experiences, and reports a striking-and intriguing-commonality among...
...Teological Proof. Here the infinitely complex structure of the universe is used to argue the necessary existence of an intelligent Designer. In English Archdeacon William Paley's famous analogy of 1802, anyone who sees a watch is forced to assume the existence of a watchmaker who made it. The marvels of nature's design, from snowflakes to developing embryos, are comforting buttresses to faith for many people...