Alexandre Koyre Quotes

Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

I would argue that the issue of God and the issue of science have the same roots.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.

The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth.

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

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Belief cannot be reckoned with in terms of science, for science and faith are mutually exclusive.

Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.

In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".

I am a great believer rather than the popular scientific way of dealing with things that 'Nothing exists unless you can prove it'. I am pretty much the other way that pretty much anything can exist unless you can disprove it.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

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

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist could be a scientist.