Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that progress occurs by chance rather than divine intervention, promoting an optimistic view of existence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects on the nature of progress, positing that it is an outcome of fortunate coincidences rather than the result of a divine plan. This perspective introduces a form of atheistic optimism, where the occurrences leading to advancements in society appear miraculous, yet are grounded in the randomness of existence. By suggesting that progress is akin to Providence without invoking a deity, Chesterton challenges traditional notions of fate and destiny, inviting reflection on the role of chance in our achievements.
In practice
In a motivational speech about innovation, one might say, 'Progress is Providence without God, reminding us that our achievements can stem from our perseverance and chance.'
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?
However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.
If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.