Bertrand Russell on Science and Religion
"Science and Religion" in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 167.
In recent times, the bulk of eminent physicists and a number of eminent
biologists have made pronouncements stating that recent advances in
science have disproved the older materialism, and have tended to
reestablish the truths of religion. The statements of the scientists
have as a rule been somewhat tentative and indefinite, but the
theologians have seized upon them and extended them, while the
newspapers in turn have reported the more sensational accounts of the
theologians, so that the general public has derived the impression that
physics confirms practically the whole of the Book of Genesis. I do not
myself think that the moral to be drawn from modern science is at all
what the general public has thus been led to suppose. In the first
place, the men of science have not said nearly as much as they are
thought to have said, and in the second place what they have said in
the way of support for traditional religious beliefs has been said by
them not in their cautious, scientific capacity, but rather in their
capacity of good citizens, anxious to defend virtue and property.
History and Method

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