Scientists on Religion

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C.P. Snow, Physicist, Novelist

“A scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.”
 
Theodore Roosevelt, Statesman, Conservationists

“The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to ‘science overthrowing religion’ are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in out time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the—surely very slight—strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does not move round the sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravity.”
 
George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

“You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For ‘Natural Selection’ has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.”
 
Laura Keynes, Philosopher and Charles Darwin’s great-great-great-grandaughter

“I like a good muddle, philosophically speaking, and uneasy truces make for the more interesting intellectual state. Atheists prefer certainty and use Darwin’s theory of evolution to state categorically that God does not exist, overegging Darwin in their argument in a way that Darwin himself would be uncomfortable with. He thought agnosticism the more coherent position, saying, ‘I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect.’ Resting in doubt, he allowed others their conscience. He set out to follow the evidence where it led, not bring down Christianity. The evidence did not have to lead inevitably to materialism, but, for various cultural reasons, this is where it led: to materialism and the culture of death. This is the real battle: the culture of life, supported by Christianity, vs. the culture of death, supported by materialism.”
 
Arthur C. Clarke, Author

“As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.”
 
Gerald Schroeder, Physicist

“Knowing the plumbing of the universe, intricate and awe-inspiring though that plumbing might be, is a far cry from discovering its purpose.”
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logician

“Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
 
John Henry Newman, Theologian

“A science is not mere knowledge, it is knowledge which has undergone a process of intellectual digestion. It is the grasp of many things brought together in one, and hence is its power; for, properly speaking, it is Science that is power, not Knowledge…,”
 
Lord George Gordon Byron, Poet

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation—
'Tis said (for I’ll not answer above ground
For any sage’s creed or calculation)—
A mode of proving that the earth turn’d round
In a most natural whirl, called ‘gravitation’;
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.
 
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poet

When Death was young and bleaching bones were few,
A moving hill against the risen day
The dinosaur at morning made his way,
And dropped his dung upon the blazing dew;
Trees with no name that now are agate grew
Lushly beside him in the steamy clay;
He woke and hungered, rose and stalked his prey,
And slept contented, in a world he knew.
In punctual season, with the race in mind,
His consort held aside her heavy tail,
And took the seed; and heard the seed confined
Roar in her womb; and made a nest to hold
A hatched-out conqueror … but to no avail:
The veined and fertile eggs are long since cold.
 
Adolf Hitler, Tyrant

“If, in the course of a thousand or two thousand years, science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, that will not mean that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it’s always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict with itself.”
 
Paul Green, Biologist

“That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.”
 
Isaac Newton, Physicist

“The more time and devotion one spends in the worship of false gods, the less he is able to spend in that of the True One.”
 
Jacques Maritain, Philosopher

“Since science’s competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.”
 
Martin Luther King Jr., Clergyman

“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.”
 
Jacob Bronowski, Mathematician

“It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.”
 
Arno Penzias, Physicist Nobel Prize

“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say “supernatural”) plan.”
 
William James, Psychologist

“Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.”
 
Jean Rostand, Biologist

“Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.”
 
H.L. Mencken, Critic

“The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.”
 
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