John Burdon Sanderson Haldane Quotes
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
Haldane, J. B. S. Possible Worlds and Other Papers. Chatto & Windus, 1927, p. 227.
Most people are surprised that this is a reality of something like physics although sophisticated philosophers have been making this point with respect to human relations for many years. Politics is a particularly good example where conflicting realities can both exist at the same time.
This is one of his most quoted lines. However, a Syrian Poet Abdallah al-Maarri, 973–1057 preceeded him with this idea by almost 1000 years. See {624477}.
This Quatrain amazingly preceded Tennyson’s expression of the same idea by almost 1000 years. See {620306}. At the time this was written Islam was entering the flower of its intellectual height where one could express doubt and be a religious dissident and not be murdered or even censored in many Muslim communities. At that time Islamic science, mathematics, philosophy, and literature was well in advance of Christian Europe. However, a hundred years later, the Islamic world went through a “Closing” where all new ideas became suspect and the religion and culture became stultified and Europe advanced while the Islamic world ceased its creative intellectual development.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS, nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-Indian scientist known for his works in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism.
