Conflict between Science and Religion Quotes

The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.

[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.

A scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith.

This much I can say with definiteness - namely, that there is no scientific basis for the denial of religion - nor is there in my judgment any excuse for a conflict between science and religion, for their fields are entirely different. Men who know very little of science and men who know very little of religion do indeed get to quarreling, and the onlookers imagine that there is a conflict between science and religion, whereas the conflict is only between two different species of ignorance.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.

Whether or not evolution is compatible with faith, science and religion represent two extremely different worldviews, which, if they coexist at all, do so most uncomfortably.

What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, Certainly not with our religion.

There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

The person who thought there could be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or ignorant of religion.

How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?

And first, it seems not at all probable, That if the Omniscient Author of Nature knew that the study of his Works did really tend to make Men disbelieve his Being or Attributes, he would have given Men so many Invitations, and almost Necessities, to study and contemplate the Nature of his Creatures: Of these Invitations divers have been mention'd already, and more might be added to them, if we thought it requisite.

Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.

Talk of the relationship between science and religion routinely reduces normally sensible people, as if by magic, to idiots. Or if not idiots, charlatans. The problem is that you are, in your bones, either for religion or against it and that’s the end of the matter. If you’re for the Pope, certain arguments, often ludicrous, get trotted out, predictably and automatically. And if you’re for Science, another set, often disingenuous, gets trotted out, just as predictably and just as automatically. This doesn’t mean the two sides are evenly matched. It just means the discussion suffers from an unusual amount of intellectual dishonesty.

All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

As they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion... Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.