stiggy wiggy
Well-known member
Here are some quotes from G.K. Chesterton on science that I thought pretty good. I love GKC, but admit that his "cleverness" might sound a bit flippant and off-putting to an atheist, so the fourth quote from C.S. Lewis (in "Mere Christianity") is a bit more substantive:
"Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition."
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Oh, and here are three from my favorite neurotic, mystical Jewish Christian lady, Simone Weil:
"The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty."
"One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work."
"Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk."
"Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them."
“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”
"Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition."
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“Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.
"And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?”
Oh, and here are three from my favorite neurotic, mystical Jewish Christian lady, Simone Weil:
"The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty."
"One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work."
"Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk."