Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Science - christiansquoting.org.uk

Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.

Vitamin C deficiency is apauling

Di-Hydrogen Monoxide is colourless, odourless and fatal when inhaled.
This chemical, which has a pH even higher than concentrated sulphuric acid, is being dumped in our rivers and oceans.
Ban it now!

Heisenberg may have slept here.

The history of science resembles a collection of ghosts remembering that once they too were gods.- David Berlinsky, theoretical mathematician

A lot of what we call science is actually faith in disguise. I think some people were desperately searching for something other than traditional Christianity, and they have elevated to the level of hard truth some things - notably about Darwin - that have not yet been proven beyond dispute. To believe in the theory of evolution is to me as much of an act of faith as to believe in Adam and Eve. I don't think it's been proven at all. I remember Piltdown Man, and the bones of that 'prehistoric ancestor of mankind' in Africa that turned out to be the bones of a pig. There is a lot of hoax and fraud in the contentions of science. The theory of evolution contains as much hypothesis as any religion. - Patrick Buchanan, Right Now! June 202

Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.- John Calvin

Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.- G K Chesterton {Saint Thomas Aquinas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, p. 88

It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.- Charles Caleb Colton

Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is. - Paul Davies, The Mind of God (1992)

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. - Daniel C. Dennett

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution. - Theodosius Dobzhansky

According to classical aerodynamics, it is impossible for a bumblebee to fly. Doctor Who

Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated -Tyron Edwards

Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source offeeling, however springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image:science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.-Albert Einstein,_Ideas and Opinions_, p. 46 (1954)

It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.- Loren C.Eiseley, "Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It," (1958)

Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits. -Paul Feyerabend, in "Against Method"

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy. - Richard Feynmann

Anatomy is destiny- Sigmund Freud

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.- Milton Friedman (1912-____) : "Essays in Positive Economics," 1953.

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith. - James A. Froude (1818-1894) In "Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations," ed. Jason Shulman & Isaac Asimov, 1988.

There is one particular angle to the stem-cell debate that nobody's addressing: the total silence of the anti-biotech left. For some reason, whenever Monsanto comes out with a genetically enhanced carrot or a faster-growing soybean, some white guy with faux dreadlocks and open-toed shoes is out there screaming about the end of the world. But when the NIH wants to crack open a human embryo so it can grow a new liver or human heart or just a plain old human in a petri dish, there's total silence. - Jonah Goldberg

Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.- Vaclav Havel (1936-).

Science is the topography of ignorance.- O. W. Holmes

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.- Victor Hugo

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.- Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, page 116

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.- Arthur Koestler

Science is the systematic classification of experience.- George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)

Science is methodology. As a belief system it's disastrous. - Astronaut Ed Mitchell, BBC TV 11 Oct.1981

I suppose that every age has its own particular fantasy: ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us, it is the other way `round.-Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered [1969]

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.- Sir Isaac Newton

There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes...that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls....Science enhances the moral values of life...because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.-Max Planck, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics_Where Is Science Going?_ pp. 168-69 (1932)

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. - Max Planck

The scientific age with its urban-industrial culture is, for all its magnificent achievements and intoxicating success, in a very real sense a dark age. Its complete bondage to nature has enclosed the mind and spirit of man in a fast prison out of which, try as he may, he can find no way of escape. The inability to perceive any longer the reality of things invisible and unseen is a sickness of the soul which cries out to be cured. The only way to dispel the darkness of the present age and liberate it from the prison within which it has become bound is to restore the proper relationship of nature to supernature and of time to eternity as an essential feature of external reality. Until this can be accomplished, there is really very little that the Church or Christianity in general has to offer to this age.- W. G. Pollard

Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, 'Let Newton be!'and all was light.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) Epitaphs

I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms.- Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Austrian physicist after whom Mach numbers are named. in Robert Youngson, Scientific Blunders: A brief history of how wrong scientists can sometimes be, Robinson,1998

Bad science and bad religion simply swap roles, the former proclaiming Truth, the latter worshiping Doubt. --- Jeffrey Satinover

Christianity believes that God has created an external world that is really there; and because He is a reasonable God, one can expect to be able to find the order of the universe by reason.- Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man, Ch. 4

See how often science has altered its very basis. Science is notorious for being most scientific in destruction of all the science that has gone before it. I have sometimes indulged myself in reading ancient natural history, and nothing can be more comic.
In twenty years' time some of us may probably find great amusement in the serious scientific teaching of the present hour, even as we do now in the systems of the last century. It may happen that in a little time the doctrine of evolution will be the standing jest of schoolboys. -Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) _Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit_ Volume 37 [1891]

Science can give us power over nature, but it cannot give us power over human nature.- Thomas S. Szasz, remarks to graduates upon his receipt of honorary Doctor of Science degree from State University of New York, May 20, 2001

Historically, religion came first and science grew out of religion. Science has never superseded religion, and it is my expectation that it never will.- Arnold Toynbee

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the old Oolitic Silurian period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will havejoined their sidewalks and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

Experience does not ever err; it is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments. - Leonardo Da Vinci, _Notebooks_

In this modern world of ours many people seem to think that science has somehow made such religious ideas as immortality untimely or old fashioned. I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics. Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation. If God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn't it make sense to assume that He applies it to the masterpiece of His creation, the human soul? - WERNER VON BRAUN

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room -- in moments of devotion, a temple -- and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated -- darkness still.- H. G. Wells, "The Rediscovery of the Unique", THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, N. S. 50 (July 1891).

Even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. - L J J Wittgenstein, 1889-1951 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52 (1921), translation C. K. Ogden and Frank Ramsey (1922)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are we still trotting out the "science is a kind of faith, so you're just as irrational as us" argument?

The following article on science and faith expresses some insightful thoughts in my opinion.

Graham Weeks said...

That is not an argument with which I am familiar. What I constantly hear are those who say people of faith are irrational. Yet these critics never examine their own presuppostions.