John Burroughs: Quotes about science

John Burroughs was American naturalist and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on science.
John Burroughs: 82   quotes 1   like

“If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology, with all its miraculous machinery, must go.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Science

“Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal Power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XI: Points of View

God , World , Star , Light

“Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and shapes the universe with man as the centre. It has no trouble to believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as the special theatre of the celestial powers powers to whom it has given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Men , Children , Age , World

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience?”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Sense , Science

“Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have religion; and added, let those who have not science and art have the popular faith; let them have this escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the people turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of splendor and pomp and power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life that now is--in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest to learn.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

Life , People , Faith , Religion

“Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.”

John Burroughs

Time and Change, p. 2 (1912)

Universe , Science

“Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. X: Religious Truth

Science

“Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.”

John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XI: Points of View

God , Feeling , Universe , Science

“Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.”

John Burroughs

Source: Accepting the Universe (1920), p.108

Feeling , Universe , Science