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Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The "constructive dialogue" between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monologue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process.
Jerry A. CoyneThe Genealogical Science is a wonderful account of how old-fashioned race science has come to be re-defined by resort to the most recent developments in genetics. But this book is not simply another story of the ideological uses to which science may be put. Nadia Abu El-Haj has provided the reader with a very detailed analysis of the historical entanglement between science and politics. Her study should be required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of science-and also for those dealing with Middle Eastern nationalisms. This is a work of outstanding value for scholarship.
Talal AsadWhen people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.
Ferran AdriaScience is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
Sam HarrisAll Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeDebunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad.
Martin GardnerBuddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.
Robert ThurmanThe most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.
Jacob BronowskiThere does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are sciences and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.
Louis PasteurScience has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
Thomas CarlyleI guess...on one hand, I spent way too much time watching science fiction and reading science fiction when I was growing up. But a part of it is I also never felt much of a connection to the world in which I lived while I was growing up, and so, oddly enough, I think I felt a lot more connected to the worlds that I read about in science fiction.
MobyPart of what I do is a craft, but part of what I do is a science. And I guess the craft comes in knowing what science to use and what science not to use.
Robert MoogVanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
Blaise PascalIn the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.
John MaedaIn my view, The Temple of Man is the most important work of scholarship of this century. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz finally proves the existence of the legendary 'sacred science' of the Ancients and systematically demonstrates its modus operandi. It was this great science-based upon an intimate and exact knowledge of cosmic principles-that fused art, religion, science, and philosophy into one coherent whole and sustained Ancient Egypt for three thousand years.
John Anthony WestThe science behind Interstellar is interesting, because some of it is absolutely real astrophysics and orbital mechanics, some of it is theoretical physics, and some of it is completely Hollywood. When a science fiction movie is based on plausible science, it's really good.
Julie PayettePsychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.
P.D. OuspenskyScience is not like the Olympic Games or something where there's a lot of people all trying to win gold medals, and if you don't get a gold medal, you're nothing. There are actually a lot of people working together and contributing to the science - and the science is the important thing.
Frederick SangerLove is a chemical reaction, but it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, it too cannot be fully understood or defined by science. Love is the most powerful form of energy, but science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, but even the most advanced physician cannot prescribe it as medicine.
Suzy KassemScience is taught like the history of science, and it's boring. Doing science fair, anything that's project-based learning, that involves field trips, that's really valuable.
Megan SmithThe conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
Sam HarrisCarved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?
Ben Aaronovitch'Science in itself' is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. 'Science for its own sake' usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it.
Rudolf VirchowEvery science touches art at some pointsโevery art has its scientific side; the worst man of science is he who is never an artist, and the worst artist is he who is never a man of science.
Armand TrousseauDoesn't it get on my nerves when people say science doesn't know everything. Science knows it doesn't know everything otherwise it would stop. Just becuase science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy-tale appeals to you.
Dara O BriainThe real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.
Philip K. DickWhen people start using science to argue for their specific beliefs and delusions, to try to claim that they're supported by science, then scientists at least have to speak up and say, You re welcome to your delusions, but don't say that they're supported by science.
Victor J. StengerMy science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly novel, the entire edifice of science might have to be restructured.
Greg GraffinIs it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
Carl SaganScience preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.
Arthur BalfourThe antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance
Thomas HuxleyEvolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
Phillip E. JohnsonScience is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.
John BurroughsMaking two possibilities a reality. Predicting the future of things we all know. Fighting off the diseased programming Of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries. Science fails to recognise the single most Potent element of human existence. Letting the reigns go to the unfoldings faith, Science has failed our world. Science has failed our mother earth.
Serj TankianMany 'hard' scientists regard the term 'social science' as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.
Michael KinsleyIt is this mythical, or rather symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science.
Albert EinsteinIf the question were, "What ought to be the next objective in science?" my answer would be the teaching of science to the young, so that when the whole population grew up there would be a far more general background of common sense, based on a knowledge of the real meaning of the scientific method of discovering truth.
Elihu ThomsonMost people...are put off science because maths is the gateway and they can't handle it. What we should be teaching is operational maths because, in general, the maths we need to carry out science is pretty straightforward.
Edward de BonoI wanted to write about the time when science became modern, around the 1950s. Right after physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, science started being so politicized and used as such a political weapon. When my father, who is a scientist, tells me about those years, I get a competing portrait of people who were expected to behave normally and be decent respectable members of society and who were also allowed this freedom to think in big and expansive ways. Now, when you think about people who work in labs, they're allowed to be socially inept in a very fundamental way.
Hanya YanagiharaIt's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.
Greg BearThere are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.
Dan SimmonsWho are we? And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, "Is there anyone else out there?" we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.
David GerroldIt's such a long mission and we get to spend so much time in space... we're doing such exciting research. And I don't want to overemphasize the life science research, but as a physician the life science research that we're doing is extremely exciting.
Laurel ClarkThe central moral issue of science is that we do not have a science of peace and hardly know where to begin in building one.
Joshua LederbergThe brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
Larry NivenIn physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
Lord Kelvin