Peter Atkins Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can. Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision

2. In preparation for our journey in which we shall nose around among the myths that a collaboration of ignorance and deep concern have jointly inspired, I would like to establish in broad terms my vision of the nature and limitations, if any, of the scientific method. I suspect that few would disagree that science is competent when it comes to the fabrication of novel stuff and novel applications of stuff in general. That, I believe, is not an issue to delay us. Nor shall I linger on the argument about whether these novel stuffs, including better medicines, better and more abundant foods, better fabrics, better modes of communication and transport, better modes of entertainment, and so on, weighed against the social costs, including better ways of killing, injuring our environment, and accidentally or intentionally maiming, add overall to the sum of human happiness. I focus instead on the ability of the scientific method to illuminate matters of great human concern and drive out ignorance while retaining wonder. On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence