.. This clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
G.K. Chesterton
The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them should really be true. The argument would appear on the face of it to be illogical, if anyone nowadays troubled about logic. It would be as reasonable to say that because some people thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly) imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow, modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid. The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other; and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on the right one. What so obviously applies to the material shape of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe. The man who describes it may not be right, but it is no argument against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong.
liberty idea man people science christianity religion true thought world earth universe wrong logic moral free illogical face impossible common decency argument religions modern atheism
history science religion conflict
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
funny evolution science humour
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tellus what to say.
philosophy science
I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it it really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
evolution science
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
science
Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
health science
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