Scientists on Religion

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Hilary Putnam, Philosopher

“Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position—and no end to it is in sight—is that of having to philosophise without ‘foundations’.”
 
R.J. Hollingdale, Biographer

“The sense that the meaning of the universe had evaporated was what seemed to escape those who welcomed Darwin as a benefactor of mankind. Nietzsche considered that evolution presented a correct picture of the world, but that it was a disastrous picture. His philosophy was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism into account but was not nullified by it.”
 
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher

"Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.

“Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.”
 
Archbishop William Temple

“Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.”
 
Jacques Barzun, Historian

“It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.”
 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosopher

“The issue is not to teach [a child] the sciences, but to give him the taste for loving them.”
 
Allan Bloom, Philosopher

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
 
Antony Flew, Formerly Atheist Philosopher

“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
 
Northrop Frye, Literary Critic

“…there is something about time and space that is not real, and something about us that is. However man may have tumbled into this world of indefinite space, he does not belong to it at all. Real space for him is the eternal here; where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the ‘eternal Now’ of our personal experience.”
 
John Searle, Philosopher

“How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?”
 
Alvin Plantinga, Philosopher

“From the theistic point of view, the world God has designed and created is something like a vast machine, although that is perhaps too mechanical a term. (Perhaps it should also be thought of as something like a vast organism, or perhaps some amalgam of machine and organism.) In any event it is a structure of enormous complexity. (Think of the incredible complexity of a living cell, with its own hundreds of substructures in the form of molecular machines.) From a theistic point of view, one task of science is to come to know something about this wonderful structure — to learn about it in the systematic and communal way that is characteristic of science. Theism is thus, as such, not only hospitable to science, but enthusiastic about it. It is because God has created the world with these regularities and structures that it can be apprehended and known (to a significant degree) by creatures such as we are. It is because God has created us human beings in his image that we are able to apprehend and know the world.”
 
Robert Jastrow, Astronomer

“If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.”

Francis Crick, Biochemist Nobel Prize

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
 
Iris Murdoc, Author

“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”
 
Viktor E. Frankl, Physician

“I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
 
Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

“The universe is made of stories not of atoms.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.”
 
The jury is in:

Robert Jastrow, Astronomer

“If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.”

Francis Crick, Biochemist Nobel Prize

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Antony Flew, Formerly Atheist Philosopher

“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
 
C.D. Broad, Philosopher

“The speculative philosopher and the scientific specialist are liable to two opposite mistakes. The former tends to deliver frontal attacks on Reality as a whole, armed only with a few wide general principles, and to neglect to isolate and master in detail particular problems. The latter tends to forget that he has violently abstracted one part or one aspect of Reality from the rest, and to imagine that the success which this abstraction has given him within a limited field justifies him in taking the principles which hold therein as the whole truth about the whole world. The one cannot see the trees for the wood, and the other cannot see the wood for the trees. The result of both kinds of mistake is the same, viz., to produce philosophical theories which may be self-consistent but which must be described as “silly”. By a “silly” theory I mean one which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily life.”
 
Hermann Joseph Muller U. S. Geneticist Nobel prize
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“To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer.”

Anonymous

“Theory guides. Experiment decides.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
 
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