Clare Boothe Luce Quotes

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural.

We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

There was a time when 'science' meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge through experimentation and observation. But it's rapidly becoming a synonym for progressive politics and materialist philosophy.

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.