Scientists on Religion

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Terry Eagleton, Author

“An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.”
 
Edmund Husserl, Philosopher

“Philosophy is the universal unity of science on a rising absolute foundation.”

“We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.”
 
William James, Psychologist

“The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the ‘evolution’ of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.”
 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poet

He who possesses science and art,
Possesses religion as well;
He who possesses neither of these,
Had better have religion.
 
Josef Pieper, Philosopher

“Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one’s existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is ‘possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.’”
 
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.”
 
Carl Sundell, Author

“Evolutionists see the upward movement of life from the simple to the more complex. They do not have an answer to the question of why there is any upward movement at all, or why this upward movement is of such a nature that all life forms are accommodated and enhanced by the upward movement, feeding off each other as they do, yet flourishing throughout the earth. They do not have a reason to explain why the banquet of life ever got beyond the stage of single cell organisms, some of which exist to this very day, and presumably have rather successfully resisted the upward force of evolution from the simple to the more complex. Indeed, without these reactionary bacteria who are still among us, would the complex forms even have appeared, survived, and evolved? Some say this grand symphony of life has only a blind and deaf conductor whose name is Nogod (a.k.a. Natural Selection). But they have no convincing argument to offer that the existence of a Nogod-of-the-gaps should be more credible than a God-of-the-gaps.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“My feeling is that the scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.”
 
Lewis Thomas, Physician

“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”
 
Bertrand Russell, Philosopher, Mathematician

“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
 
Marie Curie, Physicist

“There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing truth.”
 
****Richard Feynman, Physicist

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”

Will Durant, Historian

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.”
 
Christopher Dawson, Historian

“The other great world cultures realized their own synthesis between religion and life and then maintained their sacred order unchanged for centuries and millennia. But Western civilization has been the great ferment of change in the world, because changing the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal. Centuries before the achievements of modern science and technology, Western man had conceived the idea of magna instauratio of the sciences, which would open new ways for human understanding and change the fortunes of the human race.”

“The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organization, central control, standardization, and specialization. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialized function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organization, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform.”
 
Arnold Toynbee, Historian

“Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the “Old One.” I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the “Old One.” I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.”

“One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility” … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”
 
William Jennings Bryan, Statesman

“In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane — the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.”
 
Niels Bohr, Physicist Nobel Prize

“Scripture and Nature agree in this, that all things were covered with water; how and when this aspect began, and how long it lasted, Nature says not, Scripture relates. That there was a watery fluid, however, at a time when animals and plants were not yet to be found, and that the fluid covered all things, is proved by the strata of the higher mountains, free from all heterogeneous material. And the form of these strata bears witness to the presence of a fluid, while the substance bears witness to the absence of heterogeneous bodies. But the similarity of matter and form in the strata of mountains which are different and distant from each other, proves that the fluid was universal.”

Genesis 1: 9: “Then God said: Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear. And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared.”
 
Peter Medawar, Biologist

“There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare — particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for — that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.”
 
Angus J.L. Menuge, Philosopher

“The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A ‘science’ that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity.”
 
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