William A. Dembski Quotes

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

What scientists believe today may have to be revised in the light of observations made tomorrow, [In that sense] we can describe all our science as "theory.

By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so

To the scientist, failure to flip-flop in the face of contradictory evidence is irrational and dangerous behavior. And scientists will often flip-flop at almost light speed. Often it takes only a single observation to flip-flop thousands of scientifically learned people.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

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 firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science - that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.

You innovate in ways that stoke your economy. Because innovations in science and technology are the engines of 21st century economies.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God. As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.... A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.

The starting-point and chief principle of every science, and hence of theology also, is not only methodical doubt, but positive doubt. One can believe only what one has perceived to be true from reasonable grounds, and consequently one must have the courage to continue doubting until one has found reliable grounds to satisfy the reason.

Always challenge the old ways.

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don't see my way to your conclusion.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

The English have a scornful insular way Of calling the French light.

The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.