Max Born Quotes

In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.

Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

The wonderful thing about science is that in science, faith is shakable.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were taught in all the other classes.

When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.