Best 86 quotes in «science vs religion quotes» category

The soul is a mystery. Scientists and Theologians constantly butt heads on the soul’s definitive and can’t come to grips with its purpose and actual existence. Yet, the basic framework taught in a High School physics class helps with an explanation of the latter - the existence of the soul.

The Ultimate Truth is too sophisticated a concept for you idiots worshiping this-that asinine sky-god.

The will to believe has given us our great saints. The will to doubt has given us our great scientists. The goal of the intelligent man is a character in which the will to believe of the saint and the will to doubt of the scientist meet and mingle.

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.

To faith doubt is a sin, to science a virtue, to love a cancer and to life, suicide

...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. [Letters to John Taylor, 1814, XVIII, p. 484]

We can't tell you the origin of the experience. But we can tell you the brain does appear to be built to have these [mystical] experiences. There are examples of people reaching similar states, spontaneously. But for the most part, it takes work. Meditation and these powerful prayer experiences require dedication and practice. But people have figured out how to do this, and the question is, 'What is the source of that experience?' The answer is, 'We don't know.' Science doesn't really have an answer for you.

When the science speaks, religion must keep quiet! When the master speaks, hold your tongue, don’t make a noise!

When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.

We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation.

What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?

You can make a story mean anything, Meoraq. But that's the thing with you religious people, isn't it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.

You can make a story mean anything Meoraq. But that's the think with you religious people, isn't it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)... I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world… It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

You may be right. There may be no one greater than you or me. But that 'blind faith' kept me alive, and if you ask me, you're no different. If you've truly given up, why do you keep trying?

According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide. For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found. Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement.

You're not a piece of nothing, but the all of everything.

... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).

After an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture — I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any solution of these, and for this reason I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves: Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, any of these my promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents.

An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology, all-powerful at the earlier date. As the geologist of my young days wrote, he had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis; at present, he wisely keeps both eyes on fact, and ignores the pentateuchal mythology altogether. The publication of the 'Principles of Geology' brought upon its illustrious author a period of social ostracism; the instruction given to our children is based upon those principles. Whewell had the courage to attack Lyell's fundamental assumption (which surely is a dictate of common sense) that we ought to exhaust known causes before seeking for the explanation of geological phenomena in causes of which we have no experience.

As a child, I truly believed that there was some blue alien-like god named vishnu looking after humanity, and when the time comes, another angry god, named shiva, would destroy everything, and then the god of creation with four heads, named brahma would create the world all over again. That’s what my environment conditioned me to believe. It wanted me to conform to its delusional thoughts and beliefs. But as I grew up, I discovered something rather remarkable. It was that, all those stories were mere means for an uncivilized and ignorant people to be content with their lack of real understanding of the world.

As for karma itself, it is apparently only that which binds "jiva" (sentience, life, spirit, etc.) with "ajiva" (the lifeless, material aspect of this world) - perhaps not unlike that which science seeks to bind energy with mass (if I understand either concept correctly). But it is only through asceticism that one might shed his predestined karmic allotment. I suppose this is what I still don't quite understand in any of these shramanic philosophies, though - their end-game. Their "moksha", or "mukti", or "samsara". This oneness/emptiness, liberation/ transcendence of karma/ajiva, of rebirth and ego - of "the self", of life, of everything. How exactly would this state differ from any standard, scientific definition of death? Plain old death. Or, at most, if any experience remains, from what might be more commonly imagined/feared to be death - some dark perpetual existence of paralyzed, semi-conscious nothingness. An incessant dreamless sleep from which one never wakes? They all assure you, of course, that this will be no condition of endless torment, but rather one of "eternal bliss". Inexplicable, incommunicable "bliss", mind you, but "bliss" nonetheless. So many in the realm of science, too, seem to propagate a notion of "bliss" - only here, in this world, with the universe being some great amusement park of non-stop "wonder" and "discovery". Any truly scientific, unbiased examination of their "discoveries", though, only ever seems to reveal a world that simply just "is" - where "wonder" is merely a euphemism for ignorance, and learning is its own reward because, frankly, nothing else ever could be. Still, the scientist seeks to conquer this ignorance, even though his very happiness depends on it - offering only some pale vision of eternal dumbfoundedness, and endless hollow surprises. The shramana, on the other hand, offers total knowledge of this hollowness, all at once - renouncing any form of happiness or pleasure, here, to seek some other ultimate, unknowable "bliss", off in the beyond...

​A sage sees no conflict between Science & Religion.

At the core of the heart of an atheist is a heart that doesn't deny the existence, sovereignty and power of God but it chooses deliberately not to believe it for a long while.

BioLogos claims there is no conflict between the theory of evolution and creationism. Huh? Here is where the creationists seem to have the intellectual advantage: they at least see the conflict. Actually, it is not that BioLogos isn't aware of the conflict, but rather, it has come up with the answer to the long-standing conflict between Darwinism and creationism: simply pretend there is no conflict.

But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import.... Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?

But this was the real world wasn't it? Miracles must happen in some parallel universe.

By believing in an imaginary invisible supernatural entity, humans may become good citizens. But this is not religion. This is merely an illusion of religion.

Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing—that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus offered to them. Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice well—mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence. And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world than the existing stock.

Dare to contradict the scientist, not because of your scripture, but because of your own rational thinking.

Do flat-earthers believe that other planets are also flat?

How strange it is beholding this, and, very confident, proclaim that such magnificence occurred by accident.

I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the Copernican view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypothesis. To refute the latter I have collected many proofs, but I do not publish them, because I am deterred by the fate of our teacher Copernicus who, although he had won immortal fame with a few, was ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid). {Letter to fellow revolutionary astronomer Johannes Kepelr}

If man evolved spontaneously from nothingness to flesh then man must be immortal. Why? Well, man in his development from nothingness to substance did not exist in a controlled environment and so lay prone to countless assaults from elements of his coarse environment. To preserve his viability, he had to ride materially unscathed through all those assaults. So it is reasonable to expect that man must be immune to destruction by all malevolent forces whose vicious tackles he stumbled through in the course of his development from cell to flesh. For how can he in the stoutness of maturity be susceptible to destruction by blows that he absorbed without peril in his infancy?

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

do something from nothing for nothing is nothing unless it is made something. There is always something common with something and nothing and that is the 'thing

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

Even if god was proved beyond doubt that he did not exist. We would still believe in him. We don't need hard facts, we need true emotions.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

Fuel for religious violence comes from the creeds of the religious organizations that fundamentally depict that there is only one absolute and undeniable truth, and all others even mildly different truths are expendable.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

I love theologians, they know god cannot speak so they spend their energy trying to explain to us what his silence means

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

I don’t make any pretence of knowing about the existence of a Supreme Entity, neither do I make any attempt to create any friction among religions. If anything, I have spared myself no pains in my endeavor to smoothen the ongoing friction among all religions of the world.

In America, on the ordinate plane of faith versus reason, the x-axis of faith intersects with the y-axis of reason at the zero point of "I don't give a damn what you think".