Paul Davies Quotes

Science has faith. We make postulates. We can't prove those postulates, but we have faith in them.

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.

If I want to understand the laws of physics I have to first believe what I read about physics. I have to have faith in what I read.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

I'm not a scientist. I just read articles that are interesting and that capture my imagination, but I think there's a reason why there's so much faith placed in science.

I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I'd say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, "awe" was a word that was almost invented for scientists.

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds.

Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.

She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something ? reality ? that may not be understood at all.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.

Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation

I have never suggested any principled difference between the natural and social sciences.