Quotes About Science

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't.

God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.

Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with 'intelligent design' by default.

Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?

even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.

But that doesn't stop it being true. And far more often than it is bewildering or frightening, scientific truth is wonderful, beautiful. You need courage to face the frightening, bewildering conclusions of science; and with the courage comes the opportunity to experience all that wonder and beauty. The courage to cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth. Like my friend Julia did when she lost her Christian faith.

There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase 'non-overlapping magisteria':

The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one.

We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.

Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators.

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.

It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.

Like most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless easily capable of enjoying Vice Versa and Laughing Gas.

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. … I care about what's true.

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz's On Aggression, Ardrey's The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

We can't prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.

mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad?

frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God

Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.

Richard Dawkins

Ä°ÅŸte bu gerçek, yani ak?ll? tasar?m?n kendisine ait bir kan?t?n?n olmamas? ve kendi kan?t? yerine bilimsel bilginin b?rakt??? boÅŸluklarda bir yabani ot gibi geliÅŸmesi, bilim bir boÅŸluk bulduÄŸunda bunun araÅŸt?r?lmas? için çaÄŸr? yapma ihtiyac? aç?s?ndan s?k?nt? yaratan bir ÅŸeydir.