Yann Martel Quotes

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Religion and science look at reality differently.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man's uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous.

To pursue science is not to disparage things of the spirit.

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

It a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other view is false to the Catholic faith.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

This much I can say with definiteness - namely, that there is no scientific basis for the denial of religion - nor is there in my judgment any excuse for a conflict between science and religion, for their fields are entirely different. Men who know very little of science and men who know very little of religion do indeed get to quarreling, and the onlookers imagine that there is a conflict between science and religion, whereas the conflict is only between two different species of ignorance.

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

If God to you is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever-receding pocket.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God.

If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.