Quotes About Science

My passion is based on evidence.

To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.

More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his weight behind an initiative, funded by—of course—the Templeton Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for sick patients improves their health.36

Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.

Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.

It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.

Incidentally, I'm puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, things didn't burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did

The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.

physics come from, so God must have made them up.' Wherever there is a gap in our understanding, people try to plug the gap with God. But the trouble with gaps is that science has the annoying habit of coming along and filling them. Darwin filled the biggest gap of all. And we should have the courage to expect that science will eventually fill the gaps that remain. That is the theme of this final chapter.

To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'we don't understand it' but to say ' we will never understand it, so don't even try.

As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.

Richard Dawkins

That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.

If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice.

science cannot even make probability judgements on

Einstein also said, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that!

The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may 'believe' in evolution, knows exactly what it would take to change his mind: Evidence.