Science vs Religion I

"Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge." (Ralph W Emerson, "The Poet", 1844)

"A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion." (David Brewster, "More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian", 1856)

"Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." (Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry", 1880)

"Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned." (Gilbert K Chesterton, 'A Glimpse of My Country', 1909)

"For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy." (Émile Durkheim, "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", 1912)

"The mysteries of religion are of a different order from those of science; they are parts of an arbitrary system of man’s own creation; they contradict our reason and our experience, while the mysteries of science are revealed by our reason, and transcend our experience." (John Burroughs, "Scientific Faith", The Atlantic Monthly, 1915)

"Progress in truth - truth of science and truth of religion - is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Religion in the Making", 1926)

"It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." (Max Planck, "The Philosophy of Physics", 1936)

"Since science’s competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion."
(Jacques Maritain, "Science and Ontology", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Vol. 5, 1944)

"Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge." (Ralph W Emerson)