"All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science."
(Matthew Arnold / 1822-1888 / Literature and Dogma)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ...""
(Isaac Asimov / 1920-1992)
"Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process."
(Isaac Asimov / 1920-1992)
"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now."
(Arthur C. Clarke / born in 1917)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
(Arthur C. Clarke / born in 1917)
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
(Charles Darwin / 1809-1882 / The Descent of Man / 1871)
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."
(Charles Darwin / 1809-1882 / The Descent of Man / 1871)
"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."
(Charles Darwin / 1809-1882 / quoted from Michael Shermer, Introduction to the paperback edition" of How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, 2000)
"When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science."
(Charles Darwin / 1809-1882 / quoted from Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 2002)
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
(Thomas Edison / 1847-1931 / Columbian Magazine)
"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."
(Albert Einstein / 1879-1955 / Letter, 24 March 1954)
"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself."
(David Hilbert / 1862-1943)
"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
(Pierre Laplace / 1749-1827 / to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God)
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956 / Notebooks)
"Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men."
(Jean Rostand / 1894-1977 / Thoughts of a Biologist / 1939)
"There are no sects in geometry."
(Voltaire / 1694-1778 / Philosophical Dictionary, 1764)
"Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth."
(Emile Zola / 1840-1902)