"'The Power of One' : Interview with Susan Sarandon" at Belief.net
Quote
“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."”
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 50
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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
“Religion has no more place in science than science has in religion.”
Answer from Pasteur to his disciple Elie Metchnikoff when was questioned whether his approach to spontaneous generation was bound to a religious ideal. According to Patrice Debré's Luis Pasteur, 2000 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RzOcl-FLw30C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA176#v=onepage&q&f=false,, p. 176.
Disputed
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.
In conversation with Mahatma Gandhi and Gilbert Rahm in 1945, from [Jayaraman, A, https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/21675106, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman: A Memoir, 1989, Indian Academy of Sciences, 81-85336-24-5, Bengaluru, 143, 21675106]
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Friendship, Faith and Free Throws: Two professional basketball players to become full-time Catholic missionaries http://site.focus.org/news-for-you/february/friendship-faith-freethrows.html (2013)
Interview at rediff.com (17 January 2000) http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jan/17inter.htm.
“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”