A Quote by Stephen Baxter

Authority. The antithesis of science.

Stephen Baxter

Quote Topics

Antithesis Authority Science

Quote Author

Stephen Baxter
English - Author
Born: November 13, 1957

In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding "truth": dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.

Jerry A. Coyne

Part of science is the questioning of authority, absolute freedom of ideology. The Soviets did some very good science, but when science ran into ideology, it had trouble. Science flourishes best in a democracy.

George M. Whitesides

The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.

Michael Shermer

In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.

Michael Shermer

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Theodor Adorno

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.

Rebecca Solnit

We understand hereby, that the family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the State, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the State does.

Abraham Kuyper

When I was a teenager, science meshed with my developing ideals - such as the challenge to authority that was central to punk rock. In science, anyone from any walk of life could make a discovery that would overturn prevailing hypotheses. And that was a cause for celebration among scientists.

Greg Graffin

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Stephen Hawking

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

Sam Harris

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.

Melanie Phillips

A press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government - it's like the existence of another authority.

Stephen Colbert

That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.

Carl Sagan

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.