Louis Agassiz Quotes
Every great scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.
Louis Louis Agassiz, 1807-1873, Paleontologist, Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
First Astronomy, then Geology, proved that the Creation that was described in the Bible was not literally correct. To religious fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible is the word of God or the word of those inspired by God, the only possibility of conclusion is that the science is wrong. To the extent that undermining the word of God is not acceptable to the fundamentalists, they have used every power—including the criminal law power of the state to stop the blasphemy and discredit the scientist. In 1856, there was a much larger proportion of fundamentalists in the Western World than there is today. By 2012, the vast majority of these same populations have rejected Christian Biblical Fundamentalism, and no longer attack science for its affect on religion. The minority of fundamentalists, however, are vehement in their opposition to science.
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (/ˈæɡəsi/; French: [aɡasi]) FRS (For) FRSE was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as an innovative and prodigious scholar of Earth's natural history.
