Asa Gray 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.

We should all oppose - as Darwin did - views manifestly in conflict with the evidence, such as creationism... But we shouldn't set up this debate as 'religion v science'; instead we should strive for peaceful coexistence with at least the less dogmatic strands of mainstream religions, which number many excellent scientists among their adherents.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.

The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term 'doubting Thomas' well illustrates the difference.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

There are only three integral views of the world: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. They reflect three elemental possibilities (conscience, nature, and man), each of them manifesting itself as Christianity, materialism, and Islam.

I've met secular humanists who grew up in evangelical households, for whom 'Cosmos' was their first exposure to a scientific way of viewing the world.

In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.

Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.

All too often, the word 'religion' has become identified with those promoting a frankly anti-scientific view of nature and of our place in the natural world.

Experience by itself is not science.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

The Church does not pretend to be scientists. It teaches based upon what science tells it.

What I believe about the young age of the earth comes out of taking the Bible as written. And I've said numerous times over the years that the age of the earth, for example, is not a salvation issue but an authority issue.

I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher.

As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Religious thinkers have done their best to twist science and philosophy to back up their law.

The information and the materials [of “Intelligent Design”] aren't scientific, it's not a compromise. You either include non-scientific materials or you don't. And in a science class, we don't include non-scientific, non-empirically based material.

But I firmly believe that evolution be taught in the schools has the best witness of what modern science has taught us. To read the Bible literalistically about such issues disinvites us from using the best of recent scholarships

If we are ever to discover the laws of nature, we must do so by obtaining the most accurate acquaintance with the facts of nature, and not by dressing up in philosophical language the loose opinions of men who had no knowledge of the facts

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.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

Charles Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible because he didn’t write it.