"Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin - a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "Orthodoxy", 1908)
"Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind." (Clive Bell, "Art", 1913)
"The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "Christian Science", 1920)
"Like the great temples of some religions, mathematics may be viewed only from the outside by those uninitiated into its mysteries. (Andrew M Gleason, "Evolution of an Active Mathematical Theory", Science Vol. 145 (3631), 1964)
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." (Albert Einstein, "Out of My Later Years", 1937)
"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge." (Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot: a Vision of the Human Future in Space", 1994)
"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply." (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)
"Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science? The answers to these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet, in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to a negative answer. What complicates the solution, however, is the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by ‘science,’ they are likely to differ on the meaning of ‘religion’." (Albert Einstein)
"From religion comes a man's purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped." (Sir William Bragg)
"He who posseses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither science nor art, let him get religion." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
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